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Less than a month ago Adobe launched Apollo, enabling developers to create web applications that work seamlessly irrespective of whether a user is connected to Internet or not. Apollo was soon challenged by Dekoh, which was pretty much offering the same functionality with the added glitters of being open source and cross platform as a result of being written in Java. This was followed by Slingshot, a Rails framework developed by Joyent, that brought offline functionality to Rails apps.

Today Dojo has released their Dojo offline toolkit. Dojo Offline is totally free, 100% open source and consists of a javascript library and a 300k cross platform, cross browser download that helps to cache the user interface of your web application for offline use. They have created a sample word processor application called Moxie, to ship with Dojo offline, so that developers could get a feel of the functionality.

While Apollo is proprietary, SlingShot works just for Rails. Only Dekoh and Dojo are left as viable options for the general developer community who want to use an open source and cross platform framework to implement offline functionality in their web applications. I am sure Microsoft will put its leg in this race soon.

1. 
   April 23rd, 2007 at 6:13 pm
   John Dowdell Says:
   

   uhm, I’m not sure of the opposition to Adobe’s Apollo project here, considering that its goal is to bring Ajax or Flash webapps to the desktop, and considering exactly how Dojo manages to store larger-than-cookiesized datasets on the audience’s different machines….

   (Architectural support, such as Adobe Flash Player, helps provide this storage ability in the browsers, but it’s still a lot of work to implement well… only you know what type of application states your project needs to represent, and how people will want to work with it whether connected or no. The ability to store large objects rather than small tokens is necessary, yet not sufficient, for a good “occasionally connected” experience.)

   jd/adobe

2. 
   April 24th, 2007 at 12:16 am
   Jay Jenkins Says:
   

   jd,

   Dojo can use more than Flash to store large objects.

   “Right now the dojo.storage system includes three storage providers, a Flash Storage Provider that uses a hidden Flash applet; a WHAT WG Storage Provider that uses native client-side storage abilities in Firefox 2; and a File Storage Provider that uses the native file system if a web app is loaded from the local file system. Creating other kinds of storage providers is a great way for the community to contribute.”

   jj/unnamed consulting

3. 
   April 24th, 2007 at 2:55 am
   Bilal Hameed Says:
   

   John What makes you think I am against Apollo. Mentioning the fact that its proprietary is an apposition ? Please correct me if I am wrong but is it really not proprietary?

4. 
   April 24th, 2007 at 8:12 am
   John Dowdell Says:
   

   This line sounded to me like you were ruling it out: “While Apollo is proprietary, SlingShot works just for Rails. Only Dekoh and Dojo are left as viable options for the general developer community.” If you’re delivering over the web to browsers other than Firefox 2, then wouldn’t you be using such “proprietary” technology anyway…?

   tx, jd/adobe