It’s been several months since I first pondered the future of desktop applications. I argued that web applications had a significant pain point in that they are unable to run offline. Yesterday, Google announced a new browser plug-in called Google Gears. Gears is a step in the direction of removing this pain point. Basically, it’s a series of JavaScript APIs to interact with a local web server and persist to a local instance of an SQLite database. A WorkerPool module is also offered to emulate multithreading in the browser. This allows developers to implement background synchronization of the local database with the central web server. (The docs mention synchronization but I don’t see any out-of-the-box support. That would be a nice addition.) If your application is architected properly, it seems that this wouldn’t be a horribly complex means to add significant value to a web application. Google Docs (prediction: Google Gears implemented in < 2 months), SalesForce and BaseCamp are several immediate candidates to go Desktop 2.0.
But, I don’t expect to see them popping up at CompUSA?
