Wine Technology Blog @ WineWeb.com

We're working with some new technology that allows us to take a web application and make it into a desktop application. There are a few tools out there for this, with Adobe AIR getting the most press. As we began developing our point-of-sale system for wineries, the idea of having more control over the application on the desktop was appealing. We began developing it in Flex, which uses Flash for the user interface, but we soon became overwhelmed by the amount of additional technologies and approaches that we'd need to learn.

About that time, we found Prism from Mozilla. They're the company that produces the Firefox browser. It's a similar concept, allowing you to take a web application and package it into a desktop application that can run under Windows, Mac OS and Linux. The cool thing is that you can still run the application from a browser, but for specific applications like a POS, you get some extra benefits. First off, it's faster since you don't have the overhead of a full-featured browser. You can also customize the user interface, give the application a desktop icon, and provide better access to devices connected to the PC.

This isn't for every web application, but it reverses the development approach. Now instead of developing a desktop application that can access the Internet, you develop an Internet application that can access the desktop.