I may be in a minority, but I don’t hunger for offline access to my web applications. I don’t fly on planes all that much, and when I do I either read some dead tree ware or work using desktop tools like MS Word. When I work at cafés, I choose those that have free wi fi. I have Internet access as much or more than I need it. I’m sure my family would be happy, in fact, if my web access were cut off at 6 pm each night not to come back on until the next morning.
We’ve seen a number of efforts launched around moving web apps offline. There’s Apollo, Adobe’s web/desktop hybrid development platform. There’s Zimbra’s offline client that uses Apache Derby as its local database. Firefox 3 will include offline support. And of course, most recently, Google announced Google Gears, and showed how it could work with offline Google Reader.
Dare Obasanjo points out another reason to be skeptical about the chances for offline web applications: because it’s a major technical challenge to create them. It’s hard to keep data synchronized across the desktop and the web:
I don’t consider myself some sort of expert on data synchronization protocols but it seems to me that there is a lot more to figuring out a data synchronization strategy than whether it should be done based on user action or automatically in the background without user intervention. It seems that there would be all sorts of decisions around consistency models and single vs. multi-master designs that developers would have to make as well. And that’s just for a fairly straightforward application like Google Reader. Can you imagine what it would be like to use Google Gears to replicate the functionality of Outlook in the offline mode of Gmail or to make Google Docs & Spreadsheets behave properly when presented with conflicting versions of a document or spreadsheet because the user updated it from the Web and in offline mode?
To what extent are developers going to take on this challenge, given that for many web applications, online access is good enough and doesn’t introduce data synchronization issues? I ask myself that, then I look around and note that many developers are taking on this challenge. A bunch of smart people see a future for offline web apps, even if I don’t.
Do you yearn for offline web apps? Where do you think they’ll be most useful? Which of your applications would you like to use offline, and how important is two-way synchronization of that application data to you?
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