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The holy grail of web app productivity apps remains offline functionality. Developers unwilling to wait for Firefox 3's rumored support for offline apps might want to take a look at the new [Dojo Offline Toolkit][2]. The team behind the popular Dojo Javascript Toolkit have released a new package that aims to bring offline capabilities to web apps.
The Dojo Offline toolkit is designed to make it easy for web app builders to add offline capabilities to their apps. The description of the package on the Dojo site says there are to parts to the new toolkit, "a JavaScript library bundled with your web page and a small (~300K) cross-platform, cross-browser download that helps to cache your web application's user-interface for use offline."
If I'm understanding that correctly, that means users will have to download the small package to cache site files, but that still seems like a small price to pay for offline access to something like GMail.
Naturally I don't see Google rolling out an offline-capable GMail in the near future, but there's no reason that an enterprising Greasemonkey script couldn't use the Dojo kit to pull off at least partial offline support of GMail.
The Dojo Offline Toolkit is no magic bullet and it isn't going to work for every app, but it does seem to be one of the best options for small web developers who'd like to add offline functionality to their apps.
If you're interested in exploring the toolkit you can download it from the Dojo site. Also be sure to check out [Moxie][1] the sample application from the Dojo team.
[found via [O'Reilly][3]]
[1]: http://codinginparadise.org/projects/dojo_offline/working/demos/offline/moxie/editor.html "Moxie"
[2]: http://www.dojotoolkit.org/offline "Dojo: offline toolkit"
[3]: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/04/dojo_offline_to.html "Dojo Offline Toolkit Released"
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