I’m struggling a bit with how to know if my user has an internet connection so I can disable certain server dependent processes while they are offline.
My first inclination is to create a function to be called periodically (once a minute?) that makes a quick query to the database with a very short timeout and enable/disable user buttons that need to access the server based on the success of the database call. My questions about this solution are (1): is this a decent way to test for online/offline?; and (2) If I have 500 kiosks that are all sending 1 query/minute to test for connection, is that going to slow down the real data sync connections that need to take place? I’ve also seen a javascript solution with a script in an .js file (isOnline from Gears FAQ) that runs on a timer in the background and I’ve been able to get this to work in demos. This solution essentially uses httprequest to ping a file in the war directory of the server…but I have 2 issues with that: (1) just because I can ping a file doesn’t mean my database server is up; and (2) I’m having trouble figuring out how to access the javascript success/fail variable in my GWT java code. Any thoughts you have would be great!
