A step closer to Utopia - Offline AJAX

This week, among head line news of "Surface computing" and YouTube video support by Apple iTV, there was one other news which made headline - Google announced the "offline" add-on for all browsers to better support "Offline AJAX". Google will use SQLLITE and lightweight local web server to support this feature.

In last two years we saw a huge trend towards Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, this was viewed with skepticism by many industry pundits. Microsoft and other OS vendors launched Software + Service (S+S) model to combat the online applications threat. The argument was that installed softwaer can provide value-added services to the online application experience and I think this argument is valid at least for the near forcible future. The biggest drawback of SaaS model was its lack of offline support. What happens when you lost connectivity. Agreed, by 2050, Internet connection will be everywhere, just like air, but today, it is a real issue for most of us.

Is Google Gear going to solve all the problems? Well not, first of all it's a add-in, which means it will be installed and baptised in the geek community for a while before it reaches to grandma's computer. It will only reach to Grandma's computer when all browser ship offline capability as standard feature out of the box.

Giving credits where its due, there were some other projects before Google to try the offline Ajax experience - some at Mozilla and others at some of the popular web 2.0 companies. But the fact that 800 pounds gorilla (aka Google) jumped into this bandwagon, will certainly give a big push to this initiatives. Google is also donating most of their offline code to Mozilla experience.

Only time will tell which company will succeed in this effort but on a macro level - it is going to be for the betterment for all of us. Ubiquitous computing is nearer than we think.