What is the best approach to develope a large connected/disconnected application

We need to write an application that has two parts: One side of the users will be using it running in a disconnected environment (connecting开发者_开发知识库 every few hours to the internet), the other side will be fully connected monitoring the disconnected clients. The requirement exists that it must run on a browser.

We are proficient in PHP so I think we are going this route, my question is.. how would you lay this out on a high level?

Use web services for everything? DB replication with each client having their own DB? Use of PHP frameworks?

Thank you.

Unless you want to hassle with installing webservers (with PHP) on each clients' computer, i would definately NOT use PHP for the disconnected clients (disregarding the fact that you could create a nice installer for the whole package).

Since you MUST install a webserver to allow use of a disconnected PHP 'client-side' application, this also defeats the requirement of that it must run in a browser (if that is the sole requirement).

I would look at something else (like Java), compile it and use offline storage like files or even a lite db like sqllite and then just sync it every now and then.

If you want to run offline with a browser that means you need to run some sort of webserver on the local machine with php.

Running multiple offline data storage instances that needs to sync with a central database sounds like CouchDB.

What PHP Framework you use... that's dependend on your preferences. Only pre-requisite is a DB Abstraction Layer for CouchDB (oryou write one yourself)