Offline Storage in Ajax applications ?

I've been out of the blogging world working on a ajax application which has been sucking out a lot of time from my already small free time which I have.


I'd mentioned Laszlo sometime back, and explained how its jumping into the Ajax world from a pure flash based application server. The ajax application I was working on, however, started in pure ajax before it got involved with Dojo. Dojo is not the only Javascript library out there, but it certainly is one of the better ones. I played around with a few others including yahoo's javascript library, Google web toolkit and Sajax before I chose Dojo to work with. No server side code was one of the reasons, but its popularity was the man reason.


When I started off Dojo had 0.3 version out which already had a lot of important features like back-button-fix and keyboard event handlers which I heavily use in my application. As of today has 0.4 released which has among other things APIs to draw 2D graphics. But what really surprised me today was when I read that one of the most important things which wasn't possible to do with javascript is now not only possible but its also supported by Dojo.


Interestingly, Offline storage on browsers has always been there in the form of web cache. I also know there are some flash based applications which can persist data on client's desktop too... but until I saw the Dojo:Storage documentation it never occured to me that an Ajax based application could so easily use this feature to do something which should have been there to begin with.


Dojo doesn't only have APIs to programatically recall that cache and browse the content but also interact and modify it. Here are some references to this interesting concept


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