Blog . Jiboneus

The web will be taking over your desktop soon. Adobe recently announces their Apollo runtime platform that lets developers run their web application offline. Appllo lets you develop a desktop application by using HTML, JavaScript and Flash. The runtime also will make it easy for accessing local stored files.

Firefox 3 also is said to have some offline support that allows sites to work by accessing local datastores.

New player in this game is Slingshot, a product by Joyent. Slingshot allows developers to build or port Rails applications to the desktop. Rails web application could run offline with simple and transparent data synchronization.

Currently the downside or what lacks in a web based application is that you are tie in to your browser and there are little accessibility to data store locally.

Slingshot aims to enables Ruby on Rails web application to break free of the browser. It allows Rails developers to easily create a hybrid web/desktop application. Users could expect the same experience from a normal desktop application. You could drag in and out locally stored files to the application and t should syncs to the web counterpart.

There is a little screencast (video link) shows a demo of a calendar application, how it syncs up you the web version and how you are able to drag out and drag in vCards, iCal enents and other files.

This type of runtime projects creates a lot of potential for web based Office 2.0 products out there. Soon the lines between the web and the desktop will cease to exist.

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