Thursday, May 31, 2007

Google Gears Session

Chris Wetherell, colleague from Mountain View tells us about Google Gears, our new open source platform that just became public a few days ago.

So what is
Google Gears, why do we need it? Well, let's start with the official description from the website:
Google Gears is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs:

  • Store and serve application resources locally
  • Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
  • Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness


Basically, it means that from now on you can take the information that has been available only online until now, offline and access it wherever you are thanks to constant synchronization.

Anyone can build offline apps using Gears, you actually can start with it today. However, we thought it might make some sense to eat our own dogfood (we try to eat it as often as possible ;-) and started with bringing
Google Reader offline. So what's new with it? Right now with Gears, you can skip all the painful loading processes and it enables you to browse your feeds not only a lot faster than before, but also you can read them wherever you are no matter whether you have internet access or not.

By the way, if you want to dig a little deeper and see Chris session entirely, don't worry, we have him taped and post it later on Youtube.
Link will follow.

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