Web 3.0: Offline Applications
You’ve probably heard about and used different “web 2.0″ web-based applications, like Gmail, and BaseCamp. These applications all use a technology referred to as AJAX along with DHTML to provide an experience similar to desktop applications in your web browser.
This software has become extremely easy to use and is usually available at a low cost, or for free. For example, Writely and Google Spreadsheets provide most of the functionality of Microsoft Word and Excel, but are free, and allow collaboration and sharing automatically over the Internet.
There is one thing about these applications, however, that is a big problem. What happens when your Internet connection goes down? What happens when you want to update your BaseCamp project on an airplane that hasn’t been equipped with in-sky Internet?
Many big companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and the Mozilla foundation are working on this problem. Google already has made some progress with its Google Desktop software. It lets you access your Gmail, Google Calendar events and cached web content when you are not connected. Microsoft has various offline features in its operating system and software packages that sometimes work and sometimes don’t.
This is a hard problem, though. Nobody has come up with a really nice, scalable solution for offline data synchronization. When they do, however, it will open up a whole new era of web-based applications.
