Online/Offline Applications

Joyent is a company that offers shared and virtual hosting. I was able to get an opinion of their approach from some people whose opinions I respect at the recent OSCMS conference, and have pretty much decided not to go with them for my hosting needs (I'm currently looking for a hosting service).

However, their recent announcement of Joyent Slingshot is interesting: Joyent Slingshot allows developers to deploy Rails applications that work the same online and offline (with synchronization) and with drag into and out of the application just like a standard desktop application.

Radio Userland pioneered the idea of the local/remote web application and it's something for the Drupal community to consider. Drupal applications running locally and remotely. Syncing together (I know, I know, the publish and subscribe modules need a little love and a 5.0 release), maybe doing peer-to-peer. Hooking into iPhoto. Offline mirroring. There's so much to do!