Learning from failures: off-line support in a rails-app

As a web-developer you typically assume that your users are always using your app on-line. When asked a year ago to start developing an app for the art-consulting firm QKunst I was, however, specifically asked for a tool that had to work in bunkers. Bunkers where having a solid internet connection was typically the exception. No problem, I read about HTML5 and offline app-cache: I thought I could fix that. More about that soon.

How I face a challenge

When faced a (technical) challenge I typically search for the easiest way out: what would be the slightest change I’d have to make to my battle tested set-up to accommodate for the new challenging feature. In my case this battle tested set-up starts of with the Ruby on Rails stack, which builds on techniques that align well with how I believe the web should work too. RESTful (proper HTTP-messaging and URLs), semantic, CURL-able. And all graceful…