Beyond the technical capacities of native vs. web apps, I think we underestimate the value of the ecosystem of small app business that Apple has created with the store.

Sometimes the web makes things free as in “liberated” but sometimes it makes things free as in “worthless”.

I don’t want to turn into a closed source anti-freedom reactionary, but there’s got to be some place in here for a business model for app makers.

What could we put in HTML5 that would support that?

So far, the only one I’m seeing is in B2B or Geek2Geek plays like Salesforce and GitHub. Everything else is venture capital pump-and-dump bullshit.

And, I imagine that the techniques and policies used by those Sybase apps are what people are going to have to recreate for really robust HTML remote storage.

I am sure some frameworks ala jQuery will eventually come into being that let you just set some parameters in a JS config file, and have it handle everything.

But, until then, people will need to figure out partitioning of data, and which partitions sync in which directions (cloud to remote only, two-way, remote to cloud only).

And then there are some partitions that can be state-based-sync’d (just sync to current state–this is like what a VCS does) while others might have to be transaction-based-sync’d (replaying all of the non-sync’d transactions, in order).

And, then of course, you also need a conflict resolution mechanism and error correction for failed syncs!

The problem set is a lot like source control. CVS? SVN? Git?