Matt on…

Desktop Web Applications: or How Adobe is Going to Kill the Traditional Desktop App

There has been quite a bit of buzz lately about Adobe Apollo. It’s a framework that allows you to, using Adobe dev tools, create Web-based applications that can also be run in an offline mode on your desktop. How does this work? The key is in the ability to sync online data to a local cache on your machine so it’s accessible even when you aren’t connected.

Even more exciting is how Rails fits into all of this. Two points of interest for anyone wanting to develop offline Rails apps should be Joyent Slingshot as well as this speech at RailsConf. Since I wasn’t able to afford the registration for RailsConf this year, I’ll just have to hope that a video is posted online ASAP after the event.

If you are a Ruby on Rails developer and you aren’t excited about this, you may want to check your pulse to ensure that you aren’t a mindless zombie.