Joyent has officially released Slingshot, a Rails framework that enables applications to work offline and online in sync. The framework is made available for Windows and Macintosh with no words about Linux availability.
They have also released a Rails plugin, to allow developers to easily port existing Rails apps to Slingshot, and a CMS running on Slingshot. The source code for Slingshot will be released in June under the GPL license.
In a bid to lure developers into using Slingshot and to have some sample applications Joyent has announced a contest to port existing Rails open source apps like explainPMT, Tracks, Mephisto and others to Slingshot. The winner will get access to Large Joyent Accelerators for an entire year. The deadline for the contest is June 15, 2007.
There is a growing trend of creating applications that work seamlessly irrespective of the fact that a user is online or not. Zimbra is a really good example of this trend, and there are a number of frameworks that are targeted towards realizing this functionality. See our coverage of these frameworks here and previous coverage of Slingshot here.
