Recently I’ve been tinkering with my little Javascript game (not quite ready for public release, sorry), and other web apps.

While aspects of Javascript suck, and the platform variance definitely sucks, it is a reasonable language overall. Given current implementations I think it still would not be my language of choice for writing a big application — even my customized Google home page makes the web browser crawl — but I suppose with the commoditization of JIT technology this can be fixed.

Offline access seems like a new frontier for these apps, and I was pleased to read about the Dojo Offline Toolkit via Dan Moore’s blog.

I’m also interested, somewhat independently, in this idea of running applications on local web proxies. I suppose the cool kids all do this kind of thing with greasemonkey instead, though.

Unfortunately web apps seem like a step backward for free software. As far as I know most of the existing ones aren’t really open source — and since in large part they are running on my computer, they really ought to be.