XHR Data Caching and the Dojo Offline Toolkit

I’ve found caching JSON to be very useful when writing GWT components. Basically, the XMLHttpRequest will go to the browser cache first, and if the data is (relatively) static, you can direct the browser to cache it. More about caching in this post. If the browser hasn’t seen that url before, it will get it from the server. Using some kind of rewrite tool to make sure the data page looks like a normal HTML page tends to be good form.

But the Dojo Offline Toolkit promises to take things to a whole new level. It’ll be interesting if he succeeds. I took a look at his milestone list, and there are a number of ‘Figure Out’ steps, as you’d expect with something this ambitious and new. Well worth looking at if you write web applications of any kind.

[tags]data caching,dojo,offline web applications[/tags]