"Offline is Here" ... and Credible (!)

I spent a few minutes chatting with Brad Neuberg yesterday, following up on his presentation at Google Developer Day on Thursday. We spoke about offline data persistence for web apps, and the rapid crystallization of industry players around a particular approach.

"Offline is here," he said. Two weeks ago, that would have been just one opinion of one prominent person working in the space. Fast forward to June 1, and half the industry seems to have decided that now is the time, and that a specific SQL flavor of offline storage is the right one.

Why two weeks ago, not one week ago? Because when I asked about Firefox 3 (which has been promising an offline facility), Brad pointed me toward this change to the XHTML5 spec at the WHATWG, submitted on May 23. Here's a more readable and faster-loading spec draft section on local SQL storage (but content might change, as the doc develops). Firefox 3 aims toward this spec, and the spec API looks remarkably similar to what Google Gears offers.

So we have Dojo, Apollo, and Firefox essentially promising the same relational, origin-domain-partitioned storage metaphor along with similar APIs. Google brings plugin implementation code targeting all major browsers. For someone like me, who gets paid to make bets on the (near-term) future in order to architect applications, that's awfully persuasive.

In some ways, this is another iteration of the "dumb terminal + remote computing" vs. "smart terminal + dumb network services" oscillation... but it seems like we're maybe getting critical damping now.

Microsoft articulated a sensible "Smart Client" architecture around eight years ago: deliver apps that leverage services in the cloud but can also run offline. They should sync when online, while leveraging local hardware for performance and to maintain state. I'm using a quintessential smart client right now as I type.

The only easy way to implement that architecture and get the full benefit of local resources though was to build a .net application. Then Win XP shipped without .net; zero-click install had issues, one-click install was too late, and the rest is history.

We got AJAX and Web 2.0 instead of a lot of smart clients, which wasn't a bad trade.

I'm pretty psyched now though, because it looks we're going to get to have both.