---
title: "Zimbra: Derby for Offline Persistence"
date: 2006-11-10T22:11:26Z
modified: 2006-11-10T22:11:26Z
permalink: "https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2006/11/10/zimbra-derby-for-offline-persistence/"
type: post
status: publish
excerpt: ""
wpid: 1188
categories:
  - Open Source
  - Product Announcements
timestamp: 2006-11-10T22:11:26Z
tags:
  - Open Source
  - Product Announcements
---

Anne had exactly [the same question](http://www.annezelenka.com/2006/11/zimbra-introduces-offline-version) that I did when she saw the news that Zimbra had demoed offline access to the application: how did they do it? As I’ve covered [before](http://www.redmonk.com/sogrady/archives/001573.html), there are a variety of technologies that lend themselves to solving the problem of persisting information during non-connected usage scenarios. I pinged the folks at Zimbra to find out, and Zimbra’s Kevin Henrikson was kind enough to point me to [a comment](http://www.zimbra.com/blog/archives/2006/11/taking_zimbra_offline.html#comments) he posted answering the question.

So how did they do it? Derby (AKA Cloudscape, AKA JavaDB), just as Francois Orsini and Tim Bray demoed at ApacheCon [last year](http://www.sauria.com/blog/2005/12/13#1440). I’m not terribly surprised that a Java shop picked Derby, particularly since it’s been demonstrated to work in this capacity. But I look forward to hearing more about the details of how and why.

In the meantime, solutions to the Offline Problem are coming faster and faster; Scrybe preceded Zimbra in this regard, and I spoke with one vendor at Office 2.0 that has similar plans. I’d also be shocked if Google didn’t have plans in this regard. Should be fun to watch.