One of my contributions to the newly-launched Sencha Touch mobile framework is the Touch Solitaire game. This is not the first time I have ventured into the dizzying excitement of Solitaire game development; you may remember the wonderful Ext JS Solitaire from 18 months ago. I'm sure you'll agree that the new version is a small improvement.

Solitaire is a nice example of a fun application that can be written with Sencha Touch. It makes use of the provided Draggables and Droppables, CSS-based animations, the layout manager and the brand new data package. The great thing about a game like this though is that it can be run entirely offline. Obviously this is simple with a native application, but what about a web app? Our goal is not just having the game able to run offline, but to save your game state locally too.

The answer comes in two parts:

Web Storage and the Sencha data package

HTML5 provides a brand new API called Web Storage for storing data locally. You can read all about it on my Web Storage post on Sencha's blog but the summary is that you can store string data locally in the browser and retrieve it later, even if the browser or the user's computer had been restarted in the meantime.