Web development is moving on: are you?
Great article on thinkvitamin.com today, although there was one small point I wanted to quibble:
First of all, for the most part it’s impossible to develop offline ‐ this is because we use hosted services, APIs and most likely you’ll write something that uses some data stored elsewhere on the web.
I disagree — if you’re doing things properly you should be stubbing that API in your test and using git locally, allowing you to work anywhere. Testing the integrated whole must usually be done online, but full integration tests can be always be run later when you’ve done your piece of work and you’re back on the grid.
That's true. I was very happy coding on my netbook with no Internet connection over Christmas. Okay, i had no Prototype or Scriptaculous because i like to use the Google JavaScript libraries, but that was just an encouragement for me to include compatibility for people without JavaScript.
Stubbing APIs is a great idea, and i'm very happy that Git works so well offline, unlike Subversion which is virtually useless without a connection to the server!