I work for a school district in which the teachers submit their lesson plans to their principals online.
They do this using an online form I wrote using PHP/MySQL and it uses TinyMCE for its textareas. One of the major features that was requested was for teachers to be able to save their incomplete forms as drafts to submit later. This was implemented, but the new problem I’m facing is that not all teachers have access to the internet at home, thus they cannot work on their lesson plans while at home.
Of course, they could cut and paste out of a word document or text file that they save on their laptops, but then they have to cut/paste one textarea at a time, and they complain about it.
So what I was thinking about trying, is making an offline application that looks like the online form, but saves the form in an xml format on their computer. Then they could open this file to keep working on it, or upload it to the online form later.
My question is: being that my programming experience is currently limited to a few web-related languages (php, javascript, html) what should I use to attempt to write this offline app? Winbinder? Adobe AIR?
I’ve actually gone with Adobe AIR to do this.
With AIR, the form looks nearly identical to the one that’s used online and even uses the same TinyMCE library. And I didn’t have to learn much to get it going, just the AIR javascript API.
I’m also using AIR to write a few other apps and I love it.