V10 N1 Paper 4
Annals of the MS in Computer Science and Information Systems at UNC Wilmington
Spring 2016

An Exploration in Building Offline Web Applications in Ember  

Brook Bigford

Committee

Tom Janicki (chair)
Eric Patterson
Douglas Kline

Abstract

As technologies like web browsers, mobile phones, HTML, CSS and JavaScript mature, there are major shifts in the approach of engineering software to meet consumer’s needs. Traditionally web applications have been client-server driven, meaning the client software relies heavily on a connection to a server to run the application whether it is serving HTML or querying data these applications do not function without a reliable connection. If a software company does not actively embrace the evolution of these technologies it is easy to fall behind in design and functionality, limiting the capability of existing and future web applications. Around 2005, Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript) was gaining popularity in web applications and created an easier way for developers to update web pages without reloading the entire DOM (Document Object Model). Recently in 2014, the HTML5 standards were released and with them came many more API’s that all major browsers supported such as local storage, application cache and web workers. This study will investigate the advantages of several of these new features and discuss implementation strategies of these features in the popular open source JavaScript frameworks Angular, Backbone and Ember to determine which one is a suitable solution for developing single page offline web applications. At the end of the research, a real world application is proposed with a project timeline to flesh out Ember, the chosen framework, in a fully functional production ready application. After the proposed timeline is an updated review of how the application was implemented with a description of the completed functionality, an analysis of what was learned, and potential future work

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Recommended Citation: Bigford, B., Janicki, T, Patterson, E., Kline, D. (2016) An Exploration in Building Offline Web Applications in Ember. Annals of the Master of Science in Computer Science and Information Systems at UNC Wilmington, 10(1) paper 4. http://csbapp.uncw.edu/data/mscsis/full.aspx.

V10 N1 Paper 4
Annals of the MS in Computer Science and Information Systems at UNC Wilmington
Spring 2016