David Van Couvering 's Blog

Taking Zimbra Offline using Apache Derby: David Berlind

When Francois Orsini demoed how to use Derby for local storage in a browser, and after some prodding from Simon Phipps, this in turn got picked up by David Berlind of ZDNet. He was very excited and was predicting Great Things for the web because of this.

Fast-forward about a year. I was in the room at the Web 2.0 Forum when Zimbra announced and demonstrated offline support. I was impressed and interested, and wondered how they did it. I was quite surprised and pleased to later find out that they used Derby to accomplish this, and that they based their implementation on Francois' demo.[1]

In this article, David Berlind follows up by talking with the Zimbra folks and giving his take on what this means for Zimbra and Internet applications in general. He is definitely quite excited about this:

By equipping it's Web-client with offline capabilities, Zimbra has put itself within reach of a Holy Grail that many said couldn't be found. Other vendors with similar interests and with the sorts of resources that dwarf those of Zimbra — companies like Google who will want the off-line problem solved for their own Web-apps as well — can't be far behind.

[1] Francois and Dan Karp of Zimbra are going to be giving a talk about this at Java One if you're interested in finding out more.

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