With the advent of Web2.0 and more and more AJAXian applications popping up, there has been a tremendous trend to move from classical desktop applications to web based applications. While you can use an approach of offloading the whole application to the desktop (i.e. with Microweb and the like), more and more JavaScript toolkit libraries offer „offline“ functionality. That means there will be functionality for offloading the data to the client and care for the synchronisation to the server later on.

These features are especially useful for application usage where you don’t always have Internet connection, but need to synchronize the data later to the server. Dojo, a very powerful JavaScript toolkit, now gives you handy offline features. According to the website:

Dojo Offline is a free, open source toolkit that makes it easy for web applications to work offline. It consists of two pieces: 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.

Dojo offline with its small cross-platform, cross-browser download is licensed as BSD, so it’s very easy to integrate it into your applications. There’s also a video that shows you the usage of the offline tool. Dojo offline is currently marked as Beta. Overall, great work, guys!