Google Gears Up Offline Web Apps
May 31, 2007 Posted by Al Castle
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Categories: Puter Stuff, Web Design & Dev
This would have been a cool event to participate in. Today in San Jose, CA convention center, Google’s Jeff Huber - VP of Engineering, will be presenting to some 500 odd developers “Google Gears“.
A downloadable opensource (BSD licensed) browser plugin for both Firefox and Internet Explorer. The plugin provides three core Javascript API’s for both online and offline application development.
A local server allows the application to cache and server HTML, Javascript, images and so on, without requiring being online to reach the applications online server.
An SQLite database provides the means to access and store data manipulated while offline.
The ability to synchronize information once online, in a manner so as not to overly tax the browser and client computer resources.
In what some are terming a redefinition of “The Web”, Google is strides ahead of the “Web 2.0″ buzzword crowd and is providing a frame work for developers to create and extend existing offerings that should yield some truly cool new startups and applications. Google is currently working with other companies such as Adobe, Mozilla and Opera to extend the features of Google Gears. Currently it will run on all platforms Firefox supports, the Safari web browser however is not supported at this time.
Used in combination with XUL, I can see how using Google Gears could provide for a very robust and feature rich offline client for Mozilla based browsers. Even without XUL, the number of uses is staggering for all those times where connectivity is poor, expensive, or simply not available (airports, trains, downtown Bellingham).
I’ve just downloaded the developers XPI extension for Firefox on my OSX Macbook Pro and am about to try some of the demos which can be found here. This is going to be fun.
Further Reading:
Robert Scoble http://scobleizer.com/2007/05/30/google-brings-developers-offline-with-gears-new-offline-reader/
Artur Bergman http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/05/google_releases.html
Nick Gonzalez http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/30/google-gears-lets-developers-take-apps-offline/
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