BlackBox

If you haven’t heard it by now you’re probably under a rock, but this I think is pretty slick, offline Web apps through a browser plugin (firefox, IE, windows, mac, and linux).

Google Gears is an API that lets you run your Web application in offline mode. Now some people don’t agree with this, but it is coming (Dojo Toolkit Offline and Slingshot for Rails are being developed right now and I’m sure there are more).

And I do agree with some of his points, and I honestly can’t say in which direction RIA is going to go, here are the options I see:

1. Desktop apps (swing, cocoa, whatever) that take advantage of web services and do mashups on a local app - probably requires something like Apple’s WebKit to do it well though.
2. Flash apps that can run locally and access remote web services
3. Ajax apps that can run locally and access remote web services
4. Or … all of the above.

One of the arguments that David talks about in his post is that you aren’t on a plane, yeah well sometimes I do go to a coffee shop (like Starbuck’s) that charges for wifi that I really don’t feel I should have to pay for and all of the things I have to do (my tasks) are stored in a web app. It would be really nice to have something like this available to me in those situations.

Another idea that was brought up to me by someone on the Tucson JUG list is something like an offline P2P app, or ITunes style application, which makes perfect sense. It combines the best of both worlds, online synchronization with offline capabilities.

Personally I think that this is a really interesting development and its been going around (dojo has offline, there’s something called Slingshot for rails apps, etc.).

Where does everyone see this thing going?