Chapter 2. Building a To-do App

In Chapter 1, The Pain of Being Offline, we laid the foundation for why offline-first development is important. Now, let's build an app with this approach. The app that we'll be building is a to-do app that has been written using the Sencha Touch JavaScript framework. As Sencha Touch is just JavaScript under the hood, you can view it in any browser. Additionally, if you're a mobile developer, fear not. We'll use Cordova to deploy your app to an iOS device as well. The section on Cordova is entirely optional and works for Android as well, with minor modifications along the way.

Let's start by getting your development environment configured. For simplicity, I assume that you're running Mac OS X and Chrome. The instructions may differ slightly with different operating systems and browsers. I'll call out the differences as we go along.