Offline Web applications are at the forefront of a new approach to applicaton development. These offline apps are developed using Web technologies such as HTML and Flash and can take advantage of the resources of a user’s computer as well as those of the Internet. For a country like Pakistan where every byte is important and the connectivity (and electricity availability) reliability is not very high, these apps can have a huge impact.

Here’s  a quote from Technology Review magazine which called this as one of the top 10 emerging technologies.

The Adobe team chose to base the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) system on HTML and Flash for several reasons, says Kevin Lynch, chief software architect at Adobe Systems. First, it makes it easy for desktop applications to swap content with websites: for example, information from a website can be pulled into an AIR application with its formatting intact. Second, it should simplify development, encouraging a broader range of applications. Programmers can easily rebuild existing Web applications to work on the desktop. And in the same way that Web-based applications can be built once and will then run on any device with a browser, an application built on AIR will run on any machine that has AIR installed.

For more info check out these videos (here and here) which talk about Adobe’s vision on offline web apps.