* Apps on a Plane from Etelos Systems
When the movie “Snakes on a Plane” first came out I remembering being surprised at the mildly positive critical response the movie got. The movie’s premise is several thousand air miles south of believable and when I finally rented it from Blockbuster I found it so unremittingly awful that I gave up after about two reels. To misquote Dorothy Parker: This movie is not to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
Be that as it may, the surprise I experienced with the critical response to “Snakes on a Plane” was rather less than my surprise over a number of bloggers and other commentators’ negative remarks about a product called “Apps on a Plane” to be released this coming Fall by a company named Etelos Systems.
The idea of Apps on a Plane is to make it possible to use Web applications when there’s no Internet service. In addition the system could also handle problems such as a temporary loss of connectivity that can cause some Web applications to loose work in progress.
Essentially, Apps on a Plane is a smart client-side caching system that is limited to support Etelos’ own applications. According to the advance information, to work at all Apps on a Plane must be integrated into the application at code level. The result is that when your browser becomes disconnected from the Web, any data updates you make are queued so that on reconnection Apps on a Plane can apply your updates to the Web application database.
There are a number of open questions to be answered such as how exactly will conflicting updates be resolved. The company glosses over the issue in the advance information but obviously there are some important limits and consequences. For example, given that the disconnected PC’s clock could be significantly different from server time temporal precedence rules would be unworkable.
Most of the criticisms about Apps on a Plane (for an example, click here or preview the link here) seem to revolve less around the technology and instead focus on being concerned with disparaging the no-down-time culture that this technology ostensibly applies to. The fact is that there are many occasions when you want to use an application and when connectivity isn’t available, such as during site visits and meetings with clients. Anything that extends the reach and utility value of Software as a Service is good for the industry and good for customers.
Perhaps what is needed is a better understanding by developers of the nature of Web application transactions. But no mater how they optimize Web application service delivery, given how powerful laptops are today, I can imagine running most if not all server-side code on customer laptops in a proxy mode with automatic code updates and on-availability synchronization becoming a common deployment strategy. It’s all rather back to the future isn’t it? Now wouldn’t that be a good title for a movie?
