Question

Is there an easy way to manage offline data with a web app, and synchronize with a server when there is a connection? I have been looking at Meteor, CouchDB and the likes, but still not sure what would be the least painfull way.

I could of course implement it myself with sockets or something similar, but if something is already made for the purpose, I don’t see a reason to do it again.

I’m planning to work with Node as the server.

Thanks

Answer 1

You’re talking about two things; 1) How to store/persist data if/when offline (storage mechanism), and 2) How to synchronize with a server when online (communication mechanism). The answer to 1 is some kind of local storage, and there any several ways of doing that (localstorage, websql, filesystem APIs etc) depending on your platform. The answer to 2 really depend on how urgent your synchronization needs are, but in general you can use HTTP itself with periodic (long-) polling, websockets and similar.

On top of both storage and communication mechanisms there are numerous libraries that make the job simpler, like Meteor (communication) and CouchDB (storage), but also many many more. There are even libraries that take care of the actual synchronization mechanism (with possible conflict resolution as well), but this very much depends on your actual application.

Updated: This framework looks promising, but I haven’t tested it myself:

http://blog.nateps.com/announcing-racer-experimental-realtime-model