The new Google Maps is cool, and so are many of the other sites out there venturing into more client side work (AJAX, if you must, although calling it new is a bit of stretch). But lets face it, how many of them are really practical? One could argue that Gmail is using this for some real down to earth features, but I think you’ll find that in the minority instead of the majority. What I’d like to see this technology being used to replicate more the “desktop software” features in web applications. The example that came to mind is writing blog entries.
I’m using WordPress to manage my blog. It does a nice enough job for most things, although I still have my gripes. When I first start an entry in WP I will generally save as a draft after the first few lines to make sure that if something happens I can at least go back to that point. And I’ll often hit the “Save and Continue Editing” button while composing the rest of the message, for the same reason. If something goes toes up while I’m writing my entry (like my network connection), then I want to keep the loss to a minimum. Hopefully you can already see where I’m going with this.
With using these client side requests (AJAX), why can’t we have an autosave feature like with commonly do with word processors? That should reduce the risk of data loss while editing things online quite a bit (depending on how often you set the system to autosave). If an error occurred when autosave was doing its thing, then it could pop up a little javascript alert window and let you know that there was a problem.
I haven’t fully flushed out this idea yet, let alone done anything that would resemble a proof of concept, but it seems like it should be doable. Who knows, maybe Google will build this into the compose message part of Gmail.