Modern browsers have powerful new database capabilities that enable applications to store data locally, and perform advanced indexed queries without a network connection. Applications can be built with offline support without any disruption to data interaction, including searching.

It was recently reported that Google Dumps Gears for HTML5. If true, with the investment Google has made in HTML5, Chrome, Chrome OS, and Chrome Frame, this is not surprising, but it does leave a potential short-term gap for offline application development.

Dojo is a very flexible toolkit; it doesn’t dictate how you organize your code or create your widgets. It simply provides tools, and it’s up to you to decide how you want to fit them together.

Last month, we announced Queued, an open-source application for managing your Netflix Queue. Queued is a desktop application created with web technologies and techniques including the Dojo Toolkit, and it is distributed as an Adobe AIR application to provide several performance boosting benefits from living on the desktop.

Mobile application development has many challenges. The announcement of Google Gears on Mobile Devices will help solve the problems of network connectivity, network latency, and limited bandwidth.

While the media has beat us to the punch with countless “on AIR” puns (and the list of companies using the word air grows), we completed work to make the Dojo Toolkit compatible with Adobe AIR in time for its recent launch. It’s a platform for web app deployment that’s somewhat similar to a browser: web applications are deployed to the desktop using AIR, giving web applications some of the capabilities of desktop apps while retaining the ability to use web app development tools like the Dojo Toolkit.

Google released the first preview of Android today. It is chock full of features and a great emulator, but there was one interesting omission.

Apple’s iPhone web application development tips are yet the latest example of blurring the lines between the power of the web and the desktop. The example that drives this point home the most is Google Maps: Google maps links open a built-in Google client rather than making a connection through the public website.

Shortly after we began working on Dojo Offline, our friends at Google invited us over to the Googleplex to tell us about their efforts in building an open source project similar to Dojo Offline called Google Gears. Since the release of Dojo Offline, we’ve been working with Google to make Dojo Offline and Google Gears work well together.

At the beginning of 2007, we announced a collaboration with Brad Neuberg to develop the Dojo Offline Toolkit, and today we are pleased to announce the beta release! Several people have asked how and why we decided to do this, and how this relationship came about. From the SitePen perspective, our clients have an obvious need for offline web applications.

InfoQ had an interesting article recently asking Is XML the Future of UI Development?. I believe that the author of the article is significantly underestimating the resourcefulness of JavaScript developers: The first up is AJAX, the poster child of the Web 2.0 craze.

This is it folks! This is the last week of dev for Dojo Offline until we pop the Dojo Offline beta out the door, either later this week or on Monday, April 16th. Last week we finished the Windows installer for Dojo Offline.

We finished a bunch of big tasks last week, mostly having to do with fit and finish and our installers: * The Moxie demo for Dojo Offline used to take too long to load — it was loading about 27 resources on page load — we optimized this to about 3 resources on page load drastically improving page load time.* We created about 80% of a Windows installer using an open source toolkit from Microsoft called WiX. Unfortunately, WiXturns out to make easy things hard and hard things close to impossible, trying to turn XML into a programming language.

We’re almost there! Here’s a laundry list of some of the code checkins from the last week: * We now provide a way to give a ‘magic’ domain name that will resolve to the localhost to help in testing in scenarios where the developer is running both the client and the server on the same machine. Polipo, our local proxy, doesn’t read and parse your hosts.conf file for local domain names or use the platform’s standard gethostbyname function; instead, it rolls its own DNS communication for various reliability and performance reasons, which means that it bypasses the hosts.conf file.

Last week we did lots and lots of coding on the local proxy for Dojo Offline. Here’s a laundry list of some of the code checkins and QA fixes: * Moxie had an encoding bug related to new lines being incorrectly serialized during the Dojo Offline syncing process — fixed * Polipo, our local proxy, was modified so that if it is online and a network error occurs, either from DNS, talking to a server, etc., we automatically ‘fault’, move offline, and attempt to replay the request against our local cache.

Development was a bit slow last week since I was at Microsoft for a few days at their research laboraties and TechFest, and I gave a keynote at Yahoo on Thursday titled “Inventing the Future”. The video of the keynote should be available online this week.

Someone managed to upload a document that broke Moxie — I’ve removed this document from the Moxie database and cleaned up most of the test docs people added to Moxie, leaving just a few. Go ahead and give Moxie + Dojo Offline a try if you haven’t before..

Sorry about getting this up a little late in the day; I’m actually in Redmond, Washington right now to attend a Microsoft research event at their R&D labs. I just got situated at my hotel and found a WiFi network to work from to start hacking on code and post this status report.

[Note: This blog post is out of date. For up to date information on Dojo Offline please see the official web page.] Hi folks; lots of news on the Dojo Offline front.First, we have put up a screencast that shows a demo of Dojo Offline named Moxie.

Instead of doing a status report this week I have created a screencast and blog post: Screencast of Dojo Offline + Demo + Release Download. .

The JavaScript layer for Dojo Offline, including the Moxie demo, were brought to functional completion. This means we have syncing working, including local data storage — Moxie now illustrates and shows both.

Every week we will be sending out a status report on the Dojo Offline Toolkit project to keep folks abreast of what we have accomplished the last week and what is planned for the week ahead. Last week the focus was on syncing and local data storage.

Every week we will be sending out a status report on the Dojo Offline Toolkit project to keep folks abreast of what we have accomplished the last week and what is planned for the week ahead. We finished the UI portion of the Dojo Offline Widget, blogged it, and put a demo release up.

[Note: This blog post is out of date. For up to date information on Dojo Offline please see the official web page.] We have posted up the default user-interface widget for Dojo Offline; this is all coded up now in JavaScript and is complete.

Every week we will be sending out a status report on the Dojo Offline Toolkit project to keep folks abreast of what we have accomplished the last week and what is planned for the week ahead. After a bunch of thought to ensure an easy-to-use and powerful API, we blogged what the Dojo Offline API will look like.

Every week we will be sending out a status report on the Dojo Offline Toolkit project to keep folks abreast of what we have accomplished the last week and what is planned for the week ahead. The big task last week was finishing the Dojo Offline API.

Every week we will be sending out a status report on the Dojo Offline Toolkit project to keep folks abreast of what we have accomplished the last week and what is planned for the week ahead. The big task last week was finishing mockups of what potential offline-enabled web applications might look like.

Every week we will be sending out a status report on the Dojo Offline Toolkit project to keep folks abreast of what SitePen has accomplished the last week and what is planned for the week ahead. On Tuesday we kicked off the project with a blog post on the SitePen blog (view in HyperScope).