Browser-Based Apps and the Offline Problem

Following on Google’s recent release of their Browser Sync and Spreadsheet applications, there’s been a lot of discussion about whether this writes finis to Microsoft Office. Perhaps the main reason why it isn’t is the offline problem: what happens when you lose your connection to the internet — because the ISP screwed up, because your flight took off, because of the blue screen of death… The answer now is that you have to stop working in that particular browser-based application; there’s no way to get your data entered offline to persist until you re-establish your connection.

There’s a good piece on this by David Berlind on ZDNEt, discussing some of the technology that we can look to for solutions in the near future:

People are trying to figure out how to take the persistence capabilities in both Flash and Java, and instead of using that persistence just to handle whatever Flash or Java app you’re running, it could be used to store Web pages (for fetching when offline) and user data (for submitting when offline). The “storage driver” (and I use that term loosely) which is the piece of software that says “oh, the end user just pressed the submit button, hand the data to me and I’ll store it in whatever cache I have access to” is written in Flash or Java (depending on which of the two environments is being used). 

The next natural step is to figure how to turn something more dynamic, like a USB-based thumb drive, into the persistence mechanism that such a Flash- or Java-based storage driver uses to handle the persistence of anything that may have to last until the next session or whenever a connectivity returns (cookies, history, the Web pages that normally drive your Web-apps, the data you create with those Web-apps, etc.). This way, you can take you’re computing environment with you, on a thumbdrive. All you’d have to do is plug it in anywhere you go, and voila, there’s you’re entire browser-based computing environment just the way you last left it. Even better, let’s say the next place you plug your thumb drive into has a connection to the Internet. Then, any data that needs to synch into the cloud synchs (imagine your offline authored Typepad blogs going to Typepad, your updates to a WikiCalc spreadseet going to the right WikiCalc spreadsheet, or the emails you composed for Gmail automatically flowing through your Gmail outbox).
» Could Web-based PowerPoint-killers be the last straw for MS-Office? | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com