Web2.0 meet Joyent Slingshot
The guys at Joyent, have done it again. They've been quietly working on a product called Slingshot, which allows for developers to create Ruby on Rails applications and have an offline version of the rails application which runs on a users windows or mac pc.
Joyent Slingshot allows Rails developers to easily create a hybrid Web/desktop application with the experience a user expects from a normal desktop application. Drag in and out of the Rails application for files, email, iCal events, vCards, bookmarks (html files) to begin with. Before final release, Joyent will be extending this to native filesystem integration and native datastore for additional data-types.
They've got a screencast of this in action on their Joyeur blog. We should soon be seeing more interesting things happening with online/offline data syncronisation in the near future.
The guys from Magnetk who were developing Slingshot with Joyent have more information on their blog.