Business Web Application Advice

[HullTed]

Hi,
I'm just after a bit of advice really - to give me some research ideas.

I wrote a business web application (for my employer - a building company) that manages Operatives Jobs, i.e. the Operative has a hand held device/PDA/Smartphone out in the field and they can recieve and update jobs on it in real time.
The application is a Web Application written using Visual Studio 2005 (Framework 2) in VB.NET. (was written in 2007 and still updated now)
The old part of the system used Mobile Forms (due to limitations at the time of the PDAs), new parts check to see if the device is a smartphone so we can use normal (Ajax enabled) web forms.
I used Web Services to carry out database activity.

The application works okay but we are hoping to develop a completely new version.

The main problem/criticism we had was that when there was a loss of the mobile network signal, data & connectivity was lost and the system could not be used 'off-line'.

The Operatives need to be (mostly) connected because they need up-to-date information at their fingertips.

The solution I am looking for would hopefully still be mostly connected, but could cater for loss of signal. When there is a loss of signal the application could store information locally before uploading it once the connection was restored.

We still want to develop a Web App (because of the different devices we use) but what technologies should we use?

I have been thinking about Visual Studio 2010 & HTML5. Can anybody offer advice or different technologies?
(I work for a large organisation so we cannot move onto Visual Studio 2012/2013 because our infrastructure does not match the needed requirements)
(I only really have an extensive knowledge of Visual Basic so would prefer this language)

Sorry if I've posted this in the wrong place but any general thoughts would be welcome (I'm not looking for a comlete solution!!)

Thanks,

Ted

 

[jmcilhinney]

You can't create a web application because, by definition, a web app is running on a web server and a loss of connectivity means that the whole app is unavailable. If you want offline functionality then the app has to be able to run when the device is offline, which means that it must run locally.

I would suggest that you look into something that we've worked with in my office recently. We started by creating an ASP.NET MVC application in VS. Once that's done, you can actually run it as a web site if you want. We then used a tool called PhoneGap to wrap that MVC web site into a native app for each platform we wanted to support. You do need to create a new project for each platform, which does increase the maintenance cost a bit but, in theory, if there's a change then you should just be able to modify the original MVC web site and then copy the changes into each platform-specific project.

Note that we used jQuery UI for the interface.