It really get’s hot within the Rails developer community. Joyent, the creator of Rails-web-based collaboration applications from California, is developing Slingshot: By using Slingshot you can deploy Rails applications as stand-alone apps on Mac OS X or Windows. The Rails apps can be used without the browser and in an offline environment. Back online the stand-alone Slingshot application and the online server based app can be synchronized.
The project is in an early stage – although it proves again that the Ruby-on-Rails community is pure innovation in these days. Slingshot is another argument for elegant coding with Ruby-on-Rails.
By the way, also Adobe is trying to merge the Web online and the Desktop offline world with their Apollo project. However they do not use Ruby-on-Rails but their Flash programming environment Flex.

Sources & Picture: joyent.com, joyent-com/developers/slingshot, labs.adobe.com/technologies/apollo/