Thursday, May 31, 2007

dojo.offline = apollo.db = google.gears

You know those scenes in political thrillers when a character starts spilling the beans about what's really going on? And as the real plot takes shape in your mind you start thinking about the consequences: "That means the old guy is working for them ... and the girl is going to get killed if ... wait, she must've done all that stuff on purpose, which means..." You get the idea.

Well I had one of those experiences tonight at the final Google Developer Day session, where it turns out dojo has elected to scrap their own infrastructure for offline AJAX app operation, which had been in development a long time and had just reached beta. In the runup to Dev Day, Brad was treading lightly. But what he just told us is that the dojo plugin is dead. The dojo offline high-level Javascript library will run on top of the Google Gears offline app plugin. Incidentally, Google helped pay for porting the dojo offline library.

Early in the day, when Gears was introduced at the keynote, we learned that Gears would interoperate with Adobe Apollo. This post has details.

Ok, who's left standing here?

True, "interoperation with Apollo" isn't the same as "being Apollo" (Apollo has access to the filesystem, up to the perms that the current user has). But dojo was clearly the frontrunner in offline AJAX, and has held a hegemony in vector graphics and other wicked scripty stuff.

So to keep the metaphor, I see a surprise coup d'etat. And not necessarily a bad one, either. I want to see how this one ends.

1 comment:

Brad Neuberg said...

Adam, feel free to call me if you want to know all the details of the Dojo Offline/Google Gears integration, plus our motivations. My number is 510-938-3263. I can help clear up the mystery for you :)

Best,
Brad Neuberg
bkn3@columbia.edu