Building Offline Salesforce Apps with Google Gears
Friday, September 7th, 2007“You’re on the road meeting a client at a coffee shop, flip open your laptop, and notice that there’s no internet connection. This doesn’t stop you connecting to your Salesforce.com web application and viewing account and contact information though, much to your client’s obvious surprise. While your end users have been able to use Salesforce Offline Edition to access CRM data in this disconnected way, now developers can use new offline technologies to make any of their on-demand applications work off-line.Google Gears lets you create Web applications that allow you to perform this conjuring trick. You can access these Web applications just as you ordinarily would, even though your internet connection is down. That’s because Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets you create web applications that can run offline. It replaces the dreaded “404 page not found” message with a local database, a local cache and more.”So begins an article I wrote for Salesforce’s apex developer network. I wrote it a month or two ago, and it’s just been published:
It uses a boatload of interesting technologies: Ajax (via GWT), client side browser database (via Google Gears), RPC between the client and server (Google Web Toolkit), web services between the server and Salesforce.com (apache axis). I’d recommend Gears and GWT - they were a pleasure to use. Some APIs suck. These were intuitive; I hardly looked at the documentation…
