Today, Google hosted a developer day for 5,000 developers worldwide at San Jose convention center. The highly anticipated Google Gears - an open source browser plugin which enables the creation of offline web applications via Javascript - was unveiled.

From gears.google.com
Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. Gears provides three key features:

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

ZDNet has blogged about the steps involved in the installation here. At this time, it’s pretty much still in its early stage. While developers will get to toy with the API, the public will still have to wait for wider adoptions of this technology for their favorite apps. Currently it only only supports Firefox 1.5+ and Internet Explorer 6+, Safari support being in the works.

Google Gears is not the first to venture into offline apps. Less publicized efforts were made by many parties, among others: Dojo Offline, Zimbra, Firefox 3.0, and Joyent Slingshot

On the other side of the ring, we have desktop-based web application platforms such as:
Adobe Apollo, Eclipse RCP, Microsoft WPF/E, Sun J2SE, and Mozilla XUL-Runner

Which of these will prevail is anyone’s guess, but you can be sure that users like us will benefit greatly from advances like this.

Tags: API, Beta, Desktop, Google, Industry news, Technology

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