With Live Mesh Ray Ozzie and Microsoft is trying to tackle one of the growing challenges for end users to day: keeping their devices in sync and connected. Today Microsoft announced Live Mesh. One of the key things to keep in mind is that Live Mesh is much more than a sync tool, it’s a platform to build software+services applications, built on open web standards such as REST, ATOM, RSS, JSON and more. Currently Mesh is only available on Windows XP and Vista, but they’re working on a Mac client as well. Since this is all Web 2.0 goodness I guess it won’t take long before we see a Linux client as well.
Mesh is too big to cover with one blog post, and there are already lots of great posts out there. But I will highlight one of the details I find very interesting: Live Mash enables you to wrap existing web applications and take them offline. The “Mesh Operation Environment” contains a tiny HTTP server that enables offline functionality. Microsoft is taking an approach that is more similar to Mozilla Prism and Google Gears than to Adobe Air. I still find this really awesome, as this might be the final piece to deliver some truly awesome RIAs built in Silverilght, with offline support!
"…the web-to-desktop functionality of Mesh is essentially a wrapper for the actual web app. The same HTML and JavaScript, etc. runs in a desktop window in offline mode, data is stored locally, and synced later. The difference is that Microsoft is ting offline access into the Mesh service, so developers don't just get the technology to take their apps offline, but also access to the synchronization and cloud storage services to move their data back and forth… - Read Write Web"
Some of the more interesting posts on Live Mesh can be found at:
At least we now know what one of the main topics at PDC2008 in October will be! Oh, and I like the logo!
Update: Added some more links and pictures.
Update: The offline host is called "Web Companion", shown in the developer tour video