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Offline Safety in a Cloud App

Jerry Cao
By Jerry Cao on 15th January, 2013 Updated on 22nd April, 2020

Panic computer
Photo Credit: star5112 via Compfight cc

Cloud App working, even if you’re offline

Imagine this super scary situation: You’re working in you favorite cloud app (let say it’s a wireframing app). Suddenly…. BAM, you lost your Internet connection. The app stopped working and most probably you lost your data.

That’s scary, right?

We thought so.

You know well that ‘shit happens’. You might lose the connection, or the server might be temporary unavailable. That may kill all the benefits of a cloud app. Losing your data is unacceptable.

Having this problem in mind we’ve used local storage (all thanks to our wizard of programming Jacek) to prevent any data loss in case of lack of connection to the cloud.

If you’ll suddenly lose connection to the server, we’ll save your data locally (on your computer) and we’ll let you further use UXPin until the connection will come back. Next time you’ll connect to the server, we’ll synchronize your local data with the server.

Magic? Just a little bit, the rest is hard work.

Check out the scheme below:

Offline Safety in a Cloud

With UXPin you’re safe, even if offline.

Update

Due to extreme popularity of this post (thank you so much for all the upvotes on Hackernews, likes etc.), I asked author of this feature to guide you through the meanders of his solution:

“Unfortunately our solution is not generic enough to talk about it in details :) But the general idea is quite simple. We use HTML5-called localStorage object to store changes in user’s projects locally and while the connection is on (or when it comes back), our synchronization mechanism just grabs local data and sends it to server.”/Jacek Złowocki

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