A good early example of handling partial failure is the Zimbra mail & calendar app, the original "AJAX" app on the Internet, before Gmail/Google Calendar even.

A good early example of handling partial failure is the Zimbra mail & calendar app, the original "AJAX" app on the Internet, before Gmail/Google Calendar even. The Zimbra WebGUI supported an explicit "serverless" mode, which allowed for saving things like outgoing e-mail to a local repository and then, when network availability is detected, re-synchronize with the server and transparently transition to "server" mode.