This week Google announced a new offline web application API Google Gears. Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. Gears provides three key features:

1. A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server
2. A database, to store and access data from within the browser
3. A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background

It  installs a database engine, based on SQLite, on the client system to cache the data locally. Google Gears-enabled pages use data from this local cache rather than from the online service. Using Google Gears, a web application may periodically synchronize the data in the local cache with the online service. If a network connection is not available, the synchronization is deferred until a network connection is established.

There are handful of Gears-powered offline services available, including: Zoho Writer and he nifty Australian to-do list Remember the Milk. A month ago, Google rolled out a Windows Mobile version of Gears that brings the basic idea to cell phones. You’ll be able to give Google Gears for mobile a shot when Opera Mini 9.5 comes out later this year.

Monday, June 2nd, 2008 at 11:35 am | by Kur-nia-one |