Lonely Planet Labs

Let’s Get Technical!

Justin WarkLonely Planet author

Software Development at Lonely Planet is generally all about building fast, reliable, scalable web applications for the masses which unfortunately means (limited) support for non-javascript browsers and supporting the dreaded IE6!

This has been put aside for a small cross-functional team to allow us to do some prototyping for applications intended for a limited set of users.  Without saying too much about the project, this has allowed us to experiment with some new (draft) HTML5 features such as LocalStorage and Offline Application Using Manifest.  The core use-case is to allow the user to take data offline (i.e. disconnect from the internet after browsing to the given web page or web application) and continue to use the system. The key benefit with the HML5 features is that it allowed us to build an application that will work (with some minor tweaks) on a PC, Mac, Nokia handset, iPhone, iPad, Android handset – in fact pretty much any device which supports an HTML5 browser!  Any Developer who has had to maintain a suite of native applications which work on Linux, Mac, Windows, iPhone, Android, etc will be as excited as we are.

It is early days, however we are learning a lot about the target user and having heaps of fun building prototypes with some help from the magic of Ruby on Rails and jQuery.