Wednesday, February 14th, 2007
Offline Zimbra in Action
Chris Double of Mozilla has posted about a proof of concept showing Zimbra working offline with Firefox.
The Firefox features used to enable offline operation were:
- DOM Storage for storing emails and folder information. DOM Storage is an implementation of a WHATWG specification.
- Offline Cache. A patch is available for Firefox that adds an offline cache specifically for web applications to store data (like images, pages, etc) that must be available while offline. Items are loaded in the cache using a rel=”offline-resource” element on a <link> element.
- JAR file Protocol. Firefox accepts JAR protocol URLs. These reference individual items in a JAR file and allow convenient bundling and caching of resources. For example, to reference the file /core/AjxCore.js in the ajax.jar file, the URL would be: jar:/zimbra/js/ajax.jar!/core/AjxCore.js
- Offline Events. The browser has “offline” and “online” events that are triggered when the user chooses to go offline via the menu, or when network connectivity is lost. I modified Zimbra to listen for these events and display a status indicator showing whether it is in offline or online mode.
He also put together a screencast showing him working offline.
Nice work!





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