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Information Technology News Google Gears up for offline web applications
Information Technology News Google Gears up for offline web applications | Google Gears up for offline web applications |
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| Written by Stephen Withers | |
| Thursday, 31 May 2007 | |
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That's where offline web apps come into their own. Gears provides three main JavaScript APIs. LocalServer stores and accesses application pages offline, Database stores and accesses application data on the user's computer, andWorkerPool performs long-running tasks such as synchronising data between the user's computer and the server. There's nothing magical about Gears - web applications must be rewritten to take advantage of its facilities. A Gears-enabled version of Google Reader has been released to demonstrate what's possible. "With Google Gears we're tackling a key limitation of the browser in order to make it a stronger platform for deploying all types of applications and enabling a better user experience in the cloud," said Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer of Google. "We believe strongly in the power of the community to stretch this new technology to the limits of what's possible and ultimately emerge with an open standard that benefits everyone." Support for the project has been voiced by Adobe, Mozilla and Opera. "This announcement is a significant step forward for web applications," said Brendan Eich, CTO at Mozilla Corporation. "We're pleased to see Google working with open source and open standards bodies on offline web applications." Mozilla's Firefox project planned to include support for offline apps, and hopefully Gears will accelerate development and provide the broadest compatibility. "The Gears API will also be available in Apollo, which enables web applications to run on the desktop, providing developers with consistent offline and local database solutions," said Kevin Lynch, senior vice president and chief software architect at Adobe. The Google Gears beta is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, and requires Firefox 1.5 or later, or Internet Explorer 6 or 7. Safari will be supported in a later release.{moscomment}
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