Off late there has been lot of web sites that I came across which are trying to provide offline access for their Web applications. The basic idea is that the application can be worked with in a browser offline and automatically sync up whenever you get online.
Scrybe is one such online/offline calender and organizer service that provides offline web application service.
Zimbra is another open source messaging and collaborative application. This powerful web client integrates email, contacts, shared calendar, VoIP, and online document authoring into a rich browser-based interface. Recently Zimbra announced launch of Zimbra desktop with the aim to enable offline access to its online Ajax powered collaborative suite.
This looks to be the trend in the near future. More and more applications are targeting to provide virtual desktop for their web 2.0 applications with the same look and feel. The idea behind all this is to remove dependency of “online enabled”. The idea is that user should not be bothered about whether his net connection is working or not. He should more be concentrating on his job and rest the application takes care. Whenever it comes online, it should sync up with the offline content changes. I am writing this post through Google Docs and I can see that this keeps on syncing up my updates with the back-end. I see this kind of behaviour with most of the Google applications. So, is Google already way ahead of others in the same race?
Thinking aloud there might be two ways to achieve this: The Web application build this functionality within them self and provides a separate desktop install for application/ or takes care within its web application to provide continuous app browsing experience. Zimbra, for examples, provides a Zimbra desktop to install locally. If you think about it, this is not the way forward to achieve. The installation will again be pain for users. The second way is to make browsers support online/offline mode for web applications. This sounds interesting and this is what Firefox 3 is aiming to achieve. The browser itself is trying to build in the basic infrastructure to support offline/online web applications. But I can see many challenges towards achieving this. To list a few:
This leaves me with a question, are we not going to face the same problems that we listed when Ajax was born??
