Overview

  • 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.

Last Week

  • On Tuesday we kicked off the project with a blog post on the SitePen blog (view in HyperScope). Feedback from the blogosphere and comments were great; as of today there are almost 70 responses on the SitePen blog. Here’s a few snippets of coverage:
    • Ed French: “I like what you’re doing with this, good luck. With 2/3rds of PCs sold now being notebooks using webapps offline is clearly going to be important.”
    • Jadon: “Awesome! Finally, an open-source implementation of an off-line client toolkit! I’ve been seriously wanting this.”
    • Chris Barber: “This is really awesome news! It’s the stuff like offline support that make Dojo the Javascript toolkit! Good luck!”
    • Najier: “Beautiful…This would open up many opportunities in the mobile Health Care space. I will explore some potential products to develop based on this platform. “
    • Andy Dean: “Wonderful project. I lose connection with the Internet not only on an airplane, but many other ways, especially outside the US.”
    • Jonathan: “Awesome idea! It would be neat to be able to WordPress while away from a network. That, and I like the name.”
    • Peter van Dijk: “Seems like 2007 will indeed be the year of offline access. Finally!”
    • Dan Moore: “…the Dojo Offline Toolkit promises to take things to a whole new level.”
    • Jeroen Coumans: “It looks like 2007 will become the year in which we’ll get offline storage and offline functionality in web applications.”
    • IBM developerWorks Blog: “[The] Dojo Offline Toolkit has the potential to allow for disconnected use in a lot of common web applications, such as email, calendering, and more. To the users and developers out there, how would you use such a technology?”
    • christmasgorilla: “Competition for Adobe — and Open”
    • cwinters: “enable AJAX applications to work offline, using an OS-specific component; could be HUGE”
    • dbt60626: “I’ll be following this effort closely. Wow.”
    • James Governor: “wow. Dojo takes on the synchronised web”
    • tazzzzz: “I’ve looked previously at using proxies for offline web app usage, but the coupling of a proxy and dojo.storage really makes a powerful combo.”
  • The big goal last week was to figure out on paper common user-interfaces for offline web applications. This is to ensure that the technology and API behind Dojo Offline are focused on the correct end-user’s needs. On paper we created Dojo Offline-enabled mockups of several web applications:
    • Gmail
    • Blogger
    • Google Docs
    • A Corporate Portal
    • Sales Application
  • The reason for several Google apps is I tried to modify apps that we actually use, and we use those three applications all day long.
  • We created a fake mockup on the computer of Gmail that has offline access using the Dojo Offline Toolkit. Some work still needs to be done on the mockup, but you can see a document with some of the UI possibilities here: http://codinginparadise.org/clients/sitepen/dojo_offline/SPOT_Mockups/overview.html

This Week

  • The big goal this week is to finish the UI mockups and determine the API for Dojo Offline. For the Gmail mockup, I think I am going to add a Work Online/Work Offline to what is there. I also am going to create computer mockups of one more application, perhaps Blogger or the corporate portal example I have on paper. I might also work out a simple UI for resolving merge conflicts; if this gets too hairy I will back out quickly, since it might be out of scope for this release.
  • The other big goal is to determine an API for Dojo Offline.

Outstanding Issues

  • We still need to figure out where in the Dojo Subversion repository this will live, since Polipo is currently under the GPL and we need to get a contributor license agreement from him.