After the excellent presentation last week on Cloud Computing I thought I would explore some of the options that are available to help users cope with the differences between online and offline computing. As was pointed out, there is a large trend towards bringing everyday work and data online. What then happens when your Internet connection dies or there is not one available? In all likelihood the online service and your data are completely unreachable.
The next generation of the HTML markup language, HTML 5, is drafting support for local, client-side databases. This newly available form of storage (at least new to HTML) will allow developers of web applications to utilize standard SQL to store and retrieve structured data on the computers of their users. The current generation of HTML only defines one standard way of storing data on the client-side. Cookies are small (maximum size is 4KB) pieces of data stored in a key-value pair that can be written and read by a web server. The implications of having a full fledged local database to store much larger amounts of data will be a huge advancement for web based applications. Imagine having a web application that could work online as normal by continuously sending and retrieving data from a centralized location but that would also work be able to work seamlessly offline by communicating with a standardized local data store. In the offline mode, all work would get saved locally until an Internet connection became available. Any data saved to the local machine would then get synchronized with the central location.
Unfortunately, the HTML 5 spec is still very much a working draft. Furthermore, it was announced last week that the final proposed recommendation will not be ready until 2022. 13 years is quite a long time to wait for such a useful feature. Luckily, that hasn't stopped the more impatient developers from coming up with their own implementations. The WebKit developers have added client-side database storage to their web browser engine. Google has their own version of it through their open source Gears platform. The Gears plug-in can already be used in some Google products including Google Docs and Google Reader allowing documents to be saved and edited locally for the former and caching articles from your feeds for the latter.
There is obviously a large amount of interest in bridging the gap between online and offline applications. With better tools becoming available to make both the convenience of remotely stored data and the comfort of having your data stored locally easier for the developer to manage, I think most users will begin to expect applications to offer the integration of online and offline storage in the applications they use from day to day.
Additional information:
Google Gears developer information -- includes a video presentation
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4 comments:
It is really hard to understand that they have planned HTML 5 to be released 13 years later. Who can imagine what the Web will look like 13 years later ?!?
The Web itself is just barely older than the 13 years they are projecting. HTML 5 does seem to be a huge undertaking though as it introduces many new features but 13 years almost seems ridiculous.
I believe they started working on HTML 5 in 2004. Also, I had read that they were planning to launch it in 2012 as it is believed that by then it would fulfill the W3C candidate requirements, but 2022 seem too late.
ya i even heard that they going to release html 5 in 2012.But Until then offline cloud computing cant be considered.When the internet is not workin what can we do with the data stored in our computer in html format.We can just view the database.We cant even make any updates in it.The differnce between offline and online is data viewing.
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