When you come to the world of offline/disconnected application, you will hear the new buzzwords - AIR and Gear. Before I talked about these technologies, I want to talk about what problem we are trying to solve first. What we need an application to be able to function offline? First, Internet access is not everywhere. When you are on the plane, at the coffee shop, on the Maui beach etc, you may not be able to connect to your favorite Web applications. What if you want to look at some of your reports? I would like to see the traffics statistics for my own little wedding website company - Jusproposed.com. However, I don’t see Google Analytics available offine

OK. There is need for it. Although the need may go away once the whole world is wired by WiFi or other technologies (may still take a while), we may want to solve this problem to improve user experience. Here is how the problem get solved in high level?

1. User request is captured locally.
2. All your operation is handled locally to the local database.
3. When Internet access is available, synchronize the local database with the server database.

How Gear solves this? (I learn it here)

1. LocalServer module captures browser HTTP and HTTPS requests if there is no internet access (Browser plugin works only with Firefox 1.5+ and IE6).
2. Database module (uses SQLite) stores the updates and provides the information needed. (news). When Internet access is available, it will do the synchronization work for you automatically.
3. Google gear also provides background processing mechanism taht allows I/O or compute-intensive Javascript to run without blocking the user interface.

How AIR solves this?

1. Adobe AIR is desktop application that runs without browser.
2. Apollo provides SQLite as well for storing the updates and provides the information needed.
3. Sync module will do the synchronization work when Internet access is available.

My preference

I have to pick either one of them. I would select AIR b/c ilike the power of Flex in UI. So, if AIR solves the problem, I may just stick with it. Simple?!! Since I am working for the Performance Ad Network right now, if I can pull enough data across the wire and store it locally, then I can run OLAP and other complex queries and visualize the data with the advanced data grid and charting available in Flex, that will be awesome!

Update: Flex and Gear actually can work together! (Someone demonstrates this combination via building a sales force application)