Joyent Slingshot

Joyent Slingshot:

"Joyent Slingshot allows developers to deploy Rails applications that work both online and offline (with synchronization), and with drag/drop into and out of the application as in a standard desktop application. For a high level overview of the design goals and the basic idea behind Slingshot, head over to Joyeur to read in more detail about what we're trying to do."

(Via Ruby Inside.)

Joyent really sounds like a fascinating technology. I am going to take a look at it over the summer to see if it is stable enough to use for deployment. I plan to update the grading application for the class that I was a teaching assistant for. While the grading application still works fine, it is not user friendly when the number of students increase. Right now grading can be a pain especially when there are a lot of students.

The ability to actually run it as a desktop application might motivate the moderators to grade their students on time. The interface is going to be the same but I guess the ability to have it function as a desktop application might make it seem more usable.

I have been reading an interesting article called Magic Ink: Information Software and Graphical Interface and I am interested in seeing what better user interface I can come up with for the grading application. Maybe it is time to use some of the Ajax stuff that Rails supports.