I am building an application for a friend’s event company. The software will only be used by a handful of people who run the events.
These are the essential requirements:
-
The software will capture basic data input regarding the event and
competitors. -
The software will need to work offline – an Internet connection
cannot be guaranteed in venues. -
The software will locally store data which is to be synced to a
remote database when an Internet connection is available. -
The software will display a second window sent to a projector screen and displaying updates
to the audience. -
The software will need to record data via a serial port for each event.
Though this might traditionally be a desktop application, I think there are good reasons for trying to build something like as a web app namely:
-
Easier for me to build / maintain / test.
-
Cheaper (.NET would be my first port of call for desktop but I heard Microsoft are
abandoning VS Express for Windows 8). -
Platform independent – if an onsite laptop failure occurs, the ability to use another
machine without installing and configuring the software is available, as is the possibility
of future hardware upgrades.
As I have not yet used the offline capabilities of HTML5. I’m wondering are there any caveats before going down this route – is a desktop app better, or another solution?
(I know I’d have to create a Java Applet for the serial port communication as demonstrated here.)
Since you need to communicate with hardware I wouldn’t bother with HTML5 and possibly Java applets. Just go with a desktop application.