Local Storage of Dynamic Web Applications by Means of HTML5

摘要

With development of HTML5 specification for the new version of HTML language, two mechanisms were introduced: »Offline Web Applications« and »Web Storage«.udThe main intention of »Offline Web Applications« is to cache web sources like HTML documents, cascading style sheet files, images etc. in browser's local cache. We could cache the whole web application, but its usage is to be considered only in case of static web pages, where its content is not changed frequently.udThe intention of »Web Storage« is to locally cache text-like contents. Everything that can be represented with strings, can be cached in the browser's web storage. This technique should be used for dynamic contents caching.udAfter examining the nature of dynamic web applications we conclude that every dynamic web page consists of its static and dynamic part. By combining the two mechanisms, we could thus implement local storage of dynamic web applications and gain a few important advantages. Because of caching on client side, web pages would load faster and they would also be (and that is its biggest advantage) accessible while offline.udTo prove the usefulness of before mentioned HTML5 mechanisms, we developed a learning example of dynamic web application called »Task Manager«. The application is also working in offline mode.