Web-based os

Looks like Google is hard at work on offline access to Google Docs. Google Blogoscoped has screenshots of what looks like the beginnings of such a service. No doubt Google will try to enable offline access for all of its Web apps. This was pretty apparent when the company announced Google Gears last May. Google Gears is a browser plug-in that lets people run Web applications even when they are not connected to the Internet. The Blogoscoped screenshots appear to be the first public evidence of such testing. ***

Gmail is getting support for IMAP clients like Outlook, Thunderbird, and the iPhone. This means Gmail users will no longer be limited to the Gmail.com user interface or to the weak integration they might get from clients using the much more rudimentary POP e-mail protocol. There's no word on the official rollout schedule for IMAP support. Some users have it, some don't. I do. Don't ask me why. To see if you have support, click the "Settings" link to see if you have a "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" tab. Update: IMAP rollout should be complete within a few days, ***

Open-source start-up WSO2 on Monday released an open-source enterprise service bus based on any Apache Synapse project. Called WSO2 ESB, the server software is designed to integrate different applications by translating between different protocols and converting different XML formats. The product is based on Synapse, an open-source ESB done at the Apache Foundation with the participation of WSO2 employees. The company adds additional features on top of Synapse including a Web-based administration console and a registry and repository, said Paul Fremantle, WSO2 co-founder and its vice president of technical sales. There are several open source ESB product in the marketplace, such as MuleSource, as well as those from entrenched integration vendors, such as IBM. ***