The official developer release of Apollo , a platform that lets developers run their web applications outside of the browser, offline and on the desktop, is less than a week old, and they already have competition. Firefox 3 will allow sites to work offline by accessing local datastores. And at least two
other products are offering platform products that will overlap significantly with Apollo features.
Ryan Stewart wrote about one of these, Dekoh , a couple of weeks ago and generally found it lacking. Today, Joyent announced a new product, called Slingshot . At its core, Slingshot allows developers to build (or port) Rails applications to the desktop and run offline with “simple and transparent” data synchronization. Existing Rails applications can be ported to the Slingshot platform, and include drag and drop of files to and from the desktop. In the future, Slingshot will include filesystem access to remote data. There’s a great product and technical overview of Slingshot here , and a screencast here .
