I'm not very familiar with appcache, but reading a bit about the specifics it looks like it would work fine as long as you don't need IE<=9 support. Thanks for the input!
Agree on all points. We don't automatically reload the browser though, so it's up to the user to actually get the new version, otherwise people would be very angry with us..
The main reason we did it this way, is that it is really really simple and quick to implement.
Yes, api versioning would be nice. However, with limited resources (as always) this takes you very far without it. Api versioning also only handles breaking api changes (which this doesn't really protect you from, depending on how the users act to the notification), this also notifies the users to refresh their browsers for hotpatches regarding the frontend, and also regular feature releases. So even if you have api versioning in place, I still see benefits from having this in place
That crossed my mind as well. Though, that would require both frontend and backend code. This takes around 20-40 lines of javascript and works exactly as intended, and doesn't require maintenance in two or more different places
