So my new Macbook is the best thing ever created. However it lacks something, offline web browsing. Now before you go off on one, i'm not going crazy. With the benefit of highspeed internet connections + larger hard drives, what is there to say that we couldn't have a system that stores several hundred pages of the web, for you to explore at a latter date. Plus it also has the benefit of possibly increasing your download speeds on (non-binary data at least).
So far in my head here is the plan.
a proxy server written in java. your os would point to the server, the server would get the requested data, keep a copy for itself, and return a copy to the requesting service/application.
So far that is very similar to current web browser caches, where it differs a little, is in the use of pre-fetching, lets call it dynamic pre-fetching. The server, downloads additional pages which it thinks might be used by the user, taking a maximium number of additional downloads into account to insure that it isn't killing the poor remote servers bandwidth for no real reason.
Now, on top the above, we use scheduled content refreshing, so every hour or so, we do a checksum on the remote, and local files to ensure that we have the most upto date files in our local repository. Plus have gui where the user can specify that they wish to update the content.
Now in what is a departure for me, this isn't a palm os application. But rather a platform independent java app, with next to no, gui component. I want it mainly to run on my mac
BlackBook. But it has other uses, like when the nice old fog in southampton screws with my laser based broadband!
The only thing left is a name for this pretty little thing...
"disconnected", perhaps or "isolate", the later sounds like a good name. Anyways thanks to my wealth of experience with the http protocal, most of the research for this project, is already done.
The language of choice is java in this case, for a couple of reasons.
a} memory leaks would be a constant problem in application like this where i'm dealing with large amounts of data in the background, using managed code instead of a standalone deal like, C++ makes debuging a little less painful.
b) java is the courses language of choice, plus this is basically disertation material, which is always good.
c) I can run it on my nix box, and on my osx sexy book, i mean mac, plus all you windows people can enjoy it too.
Lastly, this one isn't going opensource, at least not the whole thing. I'm looking at going commercial here
i need to earn back my £860 for this sexy black thing sitting next to me. So hopefully this should be a launch product for the firm, when it starts.
Anyways that was a long enough peice, time to do some ground research for this thing, catch ya later.
Quote of the Day
"Where Mrs. Lawman"
You ever get the feeling that your mates enjoy taking the piss?
