I had a similar problem. I decided to use a purely JSON in and out approach. The solution I’m taking on form submission is:
- catch the form submit event
- check whether or not the user is online
- if user is online then submit the form as normal form POST
- if user is offline then stringify a JSON request and store it locally (I decided to use Web SQL Database). Queue table is simply Uri and Payload.
Then I have global event hooks for the online / offline events. When the user comes back online, it checks the queue, and if the queue has items in it, it then sends them through as JSON POST requests.
If you are primarily interested in getting JSON data and caching it for offline usage, then take a look at jquery.offline.
The challenge with synchronizing in both direction is that you need to update the local cached lists with any CRUD work that you have queued.
I’d like to find a more generic way to do this.