I’ve spent some time recently working with HTML5 and thought it might be fun to use its local database capabilities to build an offline client for Sugar, especially for mobile. I know Sugar have offline apps, but they cost money and are rather inflexible. It would be good to build a framework that allowed bespoke offline applications to be built to meet clients specific needs.

Two ideas came to mind, but there are sure to be many more. Firstly, collecting leads at a business show is often done on tablets. This should be possible offline, with the stored results sent to Sugar once an internet connection becomes available.

The other possibility is simply to hold data from Sugar for offline viewing. This could be client and contact details, and maybe product details or sales history.

I know this functionality is well short of the two way syncing that can be provided by some apps, but that is much more difficult to accomplish, so that will have to wait for another day.

I’m keen to know what the capabilities and limitations are for HTML5 databases. How do they handle hundreds of thousands of records. One of my first tests will be to load large data sets from Sugar and see how they go.

Well so far I have in place the various elements needed, as follows.

1. User Interface

As these will be mainly mobile solutions I thought it best to start with JQuery Mobile to handle the user interface. This will give me mobile capabilities with very little work.

2. Internal Database

I’ve tried creating databases, and adding and reading records.

3. Communicating With Sugar

I’ve used web services to access Sugar many times from PHP, mainly for integration processes, but never from a browser. The JQuery Ajax capability is easy to use, but getting the parameters configured in JSON is a bit tricky. I can now read and insert records into Sugar, though there is more to do.

Well that’s the start. In Part 2 I’ll put all the bits together.

I would be interested to hear any comments or suggestions.