Recently I noticed an article that brought about a thought in my head. One small part of the article talking about how offline web development is dead. While it’s true, your app probably depends on maps and other API calls, this doesn’t mean that unplugging yourself (forced or otherwise) is the death of productivity.

In fact, it should be the eye-opener! What happens when maps.google.com goes offline or all your links disappear from ma.gnolia? What if your internal web application cannot reach the internet because your ISP is clogged up?

If the answer is everything breaks, then going offline is the perfect thing to do. This can make your code more testable (if your code has less expectations, then there is less issues creating simple tests) and make your end product more fault-tolerant.

Some things to consider:

1. How to handle connection timeouts and slow connections to web services?
2. What functionality can you still provide if one or more services are not working?
3. Write unittests for your app. They help you notice where you may be too closely tied to needing answers from an API.