In the recent year, I have embarked on an ambitious project to take an old proprietary database created with File Maker Pro to using a tech stack that is open-sourced and free for use by their respective communities.
As seen in Version 2 in the diagram below, my first thought to do this was to simply use the Flask micro-framework to render pages on the fly in a web browser or an offline version of a web browser using ElectronJS; but, this will not work. Most of my knowledge is in servers, databases, networking and back-end systems so I was ignorant of the challenge that the modern day front-end would have for me given this has to be an offline first application due to inconsistent Internet in the geographic location of one of it’s users.
Version 1 will show a recent architecture that will enable the application to persist offline by checking for an Internet connection and storing a local copy of the database inside “The App”. This will be written in a very popular JavaScript framework called VueJS. More on that in another blog post.
I intend to keep my blog up to date with irregular postings with latest developments.
Since Version 1 has some technology that is newer to me from a developmental standpoint, I plan to learn for 30 days, prototype for 30 days then build the app for 30 days. Each 30 having it’s own repo for progress and historical notes. Please click on repo in the last sentence to see the three of them in a Group for progress. That pushes me to a mid-November 1.0 version and have feedback and set it all live before Christmas.
Please click on image to view it larger.