New Dojo Offline Release

I am proud to announce a new beta release of Dojo Offline. This release has a huge amount of exciting new functionality, including a full port to Google Gears, a port from Dojo 0.4 to 0.9, and more.

Dojo Offline is an open-source toolkit that makes it easy to create sophisticated, offline web applications. It sits on top of Google Gears, a plugin from Google that helps extend web browsers with new functionality. Dojo Offline makes working with Google Gears easier; extends it with important functionality; creates a higher-level API than Google Gears provides; and exposes developer productivity features. In particular, Dojo Offline provides the following functionality:

  • An offline widget that you can easily embed in your web page with just a few lines of code, automatically providing the user with network feedback, sync messages, offline instructions, and more
  • A sync framework to help you store actions done while offline and sync them with a server once back on the network
  • Automatic network and application-availability detection to determine when your application is on- or off-line so that you can take appropriate action
  • A slurp() method that automatically scans the page and figures out all the resources that you need offline, including images, stylesheets, scripts, etc.; this is much easier than having to manually maintain which resources should be available offline, especially during development.
  • Dojo Storage, an easy to use hashtable abstraction for storing offline data for when you don't need the heaviness of Google Gear's SQL abstraction; under the covers Dojo Storage saves its data into Google Gears
  • Dojo SQL, an easy to use SQL layer that executes SQL statements and returns them as ordinary JavaScript objects
  • New ENCRYPT() and DECRYPT() SQL keywords that you can mix in when using Dojo SQL, to get transparent cryptography for columns of data. Cryptography is done on a Google Worker Pool thread, so that the browser UI is responsive.
  • Integration with the rest of Dojo, such as the Dojo Event system

To get started: See the Dojo Offline home page; read the new tutorial titled "Creating Offline Web Applications With Dojo Offline"; download the new Dojo Offline 0.9 beta SDK; and play with the demos.

Comments

BillSaysThis said…
Major props, Brad!
JB Boisseau said…
Hi Brad,

You've really chosen the right way by working with Gears ! Your API fits with developpers needs (I was writing an API looking like Dojo SQL when I saw your post) but I would like to suggest on thing :
why not thinking about giving the ability to work with AIR ?

Best wishes,

JBB