Complete website on client side?

Javascript became very popular these days. There are countless frameworks and plugins developed to make our web developer life easier. But... I have a question.

What are the limits of Javascript? Can we make a complete website to work only on client side?

I'm developing a very interesting project recently. I have to solve everything (even content search) in the browser. The website has no contact to the internet at all...Yes. A website without internet connection or server contact. It will be an information box with touch screen on my former college. It will work as a digital doorman and it's quite nifty (and heavy like a mountain). Our designer did his job very well. It has now a very nice touch compatible interface. (Print screens and actual "in-use" images soon)

The computer runs on Ubuntu and unfortunately nobody knows the root password :) That's why I'm sticked with Firefox. The base hardware is... very environment (therefore not too user-experience) friendly, but I will do my best. Later, when I will have more time I will reinstall the system and use Chrome instead. The Javascript animations are much faster there. And I did a little test with flash. Surprisingly (at least for me) Opera handles Flash animation much more smoothly than any other browser. I designed a little active backgound for the whole system, and it looked awesome in Opera (I tested it with an Ubuntu live CD).

I have came up with a solution, I just want to test it. If it works, I will write a full post about it. If it won't than I will write it down, why it didn't worked.

But now I have a very tight deadline so I stop writing posts and go back to work :)

JavaScript: Objects and the this keyword

Right now, I'm developing a complex jQuery plugin with a bunch of objects. Most of the these are connected together somehow in each others' definition. In one of these objects, the this keyword referenced to another object and I was not able to find a variable related to my object. The reason was I had to call one of its function in another context and with another this object. Here is the example:

var obj = function() {

    /* Private variables */ 
    var v1 = 0;
    var v2 = 0;
    
    /* Public variables */ 
    this.state = false;

    /* Public functions */
    this.update = function() {
       if(this.state) do_stuff();

       console.log(this.state); // undefined!!!
    }

};

So, when when I called the update function in another context with another this object, the this keyword referenced to the caller object, not to the object where it was. The result of this is that the state variable is undefined, because the caller object didn't have a state variable. I knew that the this keyword is the problem and I also knew that I need to reference to the object in its own functions. So the solution is to create a private variable and store a reference to the object in it.

var obj = function() {

    /* Reference to self */
    var _self = this;

    /* Private variables */ 
    var v1 = 0;
    var v2 = 0;
    
    /* Public variables */ 
    _self.state = false;

    /* Public functions */
    _self.update = function() {
       if(_self.state) do_stuff();

       console.log(_self.state); // false

       this.somethingElse = true;
    }

};

With this solution, if you create an object with the new keyword, the constructor is called and the _self variable will store a reference to itself. This won't mess up the this reference in other contexts.