David Emery Online

Desktop Web Apps

22 March 2007

There seems to be an interesting trend emerging out of the Web 2.0 bubble:

Desktop Web Apps.

It’s one of the things Adobe are pinning their hopes on with their Apollo platform, which went public this week. Apollo looks interesting, but I’m not really hugely impressed – the fact that end users have to download the Apollo runtime before they can use your Apollo app is a bit of a deal killer for me; it would have been much better if they had come up with a way to bundle it in with your code so you could just provide a simple, double clickable application to your users.

Another interesting player in this space is Joyent’s new Slingshot product. Slingshot is a desktop runtime environment for your Ruby on Rails based web-app. It looks as though – certainly on the Mac side – it’s a Ruby on Rails server coupled with a WebKit implementation, with a little bit of extra interfacing code so you can do things like drag and drop.

The big headline feature seems to be the offline mode, which allows the app to work without a net connection. This also seems to be one of the big features in Firefox 3, although in that case you’ll have to code your web app specifically to work with it. However, I’m really not convinced about the utility of an offline mode – how often, really, do you not have an internet connection? For me, it’s certainly very rarely, and it doesn’t strike me as a problem that really needs to be solved these days.

That’s not to say, though, that Desktop Web Apps aren’t a useful proposition. There already are a few fairly successful custom apps for things like Gmail and Campfire (again based on WebKit), and they certainly have an audience. The reality is, is that some people really like to compartmentalise certain actions – like reading email, or chatting on a chat room – and having a separate environment, specially tailored to that function, makes a lot of sense.