We have to provide service when our enterprise users are both online and
offline via standard internet browsers and also Palm devices and WAP

For the online applications, I assume we can use WAP for mobile devices
and the question is only the design of the server side data

How about offline?

We need to privide the same services when our users don't have an
internet connection. The things I have now is a device they called
Gateway, an industry PC, which download data from our operation center
and buffer them in various locations to wait for downloading. A note
book will come to that Gateway station and synchronize the data.

The question is: how do I design that offline application?
We may have 2 options, HTML or Swing GUI based. The HTML will be
prefered since we already have the online application built in HTML and
Java. So how does a offline notebook view a HTML based application?
Simple solution is to re-deploy the application in a local web server
with the data come from a local DB or file based persistence.

Then we need a web server running locally. Is that possible to just use
client side technologies?

The other way is to write a Swing based application to read data from
that persistence.

When come to Palm? We need to write an application running on Palm since
we can no longer install a web server or gateway in the Palm, right?

Please advise. Thanks.