David Van Couvering 's Blog

The Synchronized Web

I was listening to a RedMonk podcast with James Governor and Cote talking about their impressions of JavaOne and Sun. They were quite enthusiastic about Sun and Java (disclaimer: Sun is their customer) -- nice things to hear being a Sun employee and a Java enthusiast.

The other great thing they talked about was near and dear to my heart, and this was the Synchronized Web, as James has coined it . This defines a class of web applications where you have the ability to run your application both online and offline, including the ability to synchronize your data for this web application between your local machine and the server.

Francois Orsini and I were having drinks with Mr. Governor and David Berlind after hours at Java One and James (in a bit of tipsy enthusiasm) came up with this new term, and mentioned he was going to start talking about it, and here it is.

There seems to be some synchronicity (no pun intented) around this, because I was just talking with Bob Brewin, our tools Distinguished Engineer, and he said this is a vision he has had for quite some time.

In his podcast James specifically mentioned JavaDB as part of the technology to enable this new class of web applications. Cote was also talking about being able to run all your applications off of a USB stick, something I (almost) demonstrated at our Apache Derby talk. So, it sounds like another lightbulb moment, this time with the folks at RedMonk.

I am talking with Francois Orsini about pulling together a proof of concept that shows how you might accomplish synchronizing a Java DB database embedded in the browser with a backend server. This shouldn't be too hard to accomplish, but it would all be hand-crafted code. What we really want is to get this type of synchronization into the product itself. But that's a fair amount of work; in the meantime we're going to try to show you how you might do this yourself to build a Synchronized Web application. So, stay tuned.

Comments

• Synchronized Web is a hell of a misnomer - the fact that applications need to synchronise shows that they were not synchronized before doing so. "Always Flipping Synchronising Net" would be more accurate.

  Posted by: tackline on May 31, 2006 at 06:40 AM

• Tomcat To Go: You can run Tomcat with an embedded database from a USB drive, no Java installation required:

  http://www.javalobby.org/articles/tomcat2go/?source=archives

  Posted by: shrestha on May 31, 2006 at 01:11 PM

• Synchronized Web is a hell of a misnomer - the fact that applications need to synchronise shows that they were not synchronized before doing so. "Always Flipping Synchronising Net" would be more accurate.

  you can run Tomcat with an embedded database from a USB drive

  Posted by: yamingo on November 26, 2006 at 03:55 PM

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