I was reading up on how to make a webapp available offline. I want offline runnable webapps. The biggest argument I allways hear about webbased (business) apps is: “Yeah OK, but what if my internet connection fails?”

I’ve got a whole array of ready made answers to these questions but in the end, the best answer should be “No problem, it just keeps runnig, with a cached dataset, look”.

So a while ago I stumbled on Google Gears. This holds the promise of achieving just that. Among a lot of blogs on this, I came to this one: Google Gears Takes Web Apps Offline. Look at the comments.

So what’s wrong with GG? A lot I think, lemme explain. On this post, on another blog, I commented about the problems we traditionally had with desktop apps such as problems of deployment, cross platform compatibility and maintainability. Yes, you have to install a webbrowser extension (users often dont trust these anymore), you have to copy some files from a website (again: users often dont trust these anymore), and then run the app locally.

The next issue I have with this is that the entire app has to be written in Javascript. I felt like being thrown back in the stoneage (about 10 years ago in IT land).

I want apps that just run, without installing anything on the client side. I’m probably living in utopia…

I think the desktop is going to die, but not at the hand of Google Gears…

I’ve been playng for a while with ASP.NET AJAX Extensions. and I like it. Having studied Rails, I was missing some things I missed from Script.aculo.us so I tought that it was impossible no one would have used Script.aculo.us with ASP.NET. My collective memory (google) led me to this article: CoreWeb :: Script.aculo.us, Prototype and Asp.Net Best Friends Forever

I will check it out tonight and see what I can learn from that.