May 31st, 2007Google gears to take web apps offline: Excellent news
After the Dojo offline project, Google’s just announced their own open source project to take your favorite web apps offline.
After Apollo from Adobe and another one from Microsoft (I don’t remember the name), the trend is clear:
Take some of the excellent web apps we have over there offline, to be able to work in disconnected situations (yeah, they still exist) and probably also to diminish traffic load.
The other good news is that all these frameworks are free (hum, not sure for Adobe & MS), sometimes even open source. This will guarantee a broad adoption by web developers and initiate a whole new category of web apps.
June 1st, 2007 at 9:25 pm
I still don’t understand why offline is so important. Most of the time it doesn’t make any sense. Who needs that actually?
I think Gears will be more used to optimize user experience and responsiveness than truly using you app online.
June 1st, 2007 at 10:12 pm
You’re right about the fact that this is a solution to increase responsiveness and diminish the load of some heavy duty servers.
However, in the mid term (2 to 3 years), there still will be many occasions when people don’t have a permanent connection (sales representatives, travels, uncovered areas…). In all of these cases, synched offline is still important.
Same goes for mobile, but for a different need, it’s less bandwith consuming to download the UI offline and then only sync the data (instead of downloading both all the time).