Tobias Günther is founder and CEO of puremedia (www.puremedia-online.de), a small web-only company based in Stuttgart, southern Germany.
He has quite a long history of ajax experience (if such a thing exists for such a new technology...), e.g. a rewrite of a classic webmail client to an ajax fat client.
Additionally to his everyday web-agency life, he writes articles for german tech magazines and speaks about web 2.0 / ajax on a regular basis. When not sitting at his desk he loves to go to the cinema - so feel free to recommend some good movies... ;-)
AJAX has brought real applications to the browser. Database-backed applications, that used to be programmed for the desktop are now developed for Firefox, IE and Co. But working in the browser was usually over when you lost your network connection.
With Dojo Offline and Google Gears you can develop browser based applications that continue to work even when your network connection has said goodbye.
The ability to work offline, using your data on the road or with your customer, closes the last gap between desktop and browser based applications. "You're not connected to the internet"...doesn't matter anymore.
Realtime collaboration is also a key component to new apps. Comet, coined by Dojo creator Alex Russell, describes the set of technologies used to achieve it.
The session will teach the basics on how to create web applications that are able to run offline and how to add realtime collaboration via Comet.