Google Gears takes online applications, offline

Filed under: Design, Developer, Internet, Utilities, Web services

Google Gears takes online applications, offline

by Chris Gilmer May 30th 2007

Online applications are great, but what happens when you can't get a connection to the internet? Whether it is because you are on an airplane, or in the middle of nowhere camping, and have to get certain emails, calendar items, or files, you are quite possibly out of luck. Its sure a bummer, and one of the reasons why so many people are hesitant about using online applications for their most important information.

Now Imagine being able to take your online applications, offline, and store that data locally in a completely searchable database? Google is making this possible with Gears. Google Gears is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide complete offline functionality. Google hopes that developers will use this new toolset to create offline web applications using JavaScript APIs to store and serve the applications resources locally, as well as store data in searchable databases. All of the syncing runs in the background without burning out the browsers memory usage, or slowing anything down.

The Google Gears Beta is currently available for installation on Windows XP,Vista, as well as on Mac and Linux machines. The plug-in works with Firefox 1.5+ and IE 6+. Google's first stop with Gears is Reader, with JavaScript APIs getting released shortly for data storage for use in applications like Docs and Spreadsheets.

The official Google Gears announcement will be made tomorrow to over 5,000 developers at Google's Developer Day gathering.

Tags: api, applications, data, database, docs, feeds, firefox, gears, google, ie, internet explorer, InternetExplorer, javascript, mac, offline, online, pc, read, reader, search, spreadsheets, storage

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Xenia said 4:41AM on 5-31-2007

Although a small announcment, this is a significant step of Google. Imagine Writely to work offline, this is then a direct competitor to MS Word. Or GMail working offline ==> Outlook killer

Regards, Jason
http://olpc.com

Mike Schleifstein said 6:26PM on 5-31-2007

funny, isn't this just like adobe's apollo application?

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