From Google Developer Day 2007, Sydney Australia -

This morning (well yesterday now that I’m publishing the post), amongst many other announcements, Google released an open source project named “Google Gears“.

Google Gears (BETA) 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

From the press release:

We are releasing Gears as an open source project and we are working with Adobe, Mozilla and Opera and other industry partners to make sure that Gears is the right solution for everyone.

But what does this mean for Adobe?

This was one of the first questions to pop up on the Google Gears developer group, and one of the most exciting questions to answer. The Google Gears local storage module and API is similar to the functionality available in the soon to be released Apollo Beta. With a common API users can move seamlessly from developing a web based application with local storage, to being able to access the same local storage from Apollo.

Does Google Gears compete with Apollo? They both enable offline web applications don’t they?

Well no!

It’s a hard shift to make, to truly understand that you’re now developing a desktop application with Apollo. It’s hard because you develop for Apollo using web based technologies. An offline web application using Gears is just that - an offline web application. Apollo is so much more - a desktop application giving you the ability to have file system access, toast like messaging, native OS support, clipboard access, drag and drop between Apollo and the OS, custom window chrome (to really move away from the rectangular bounds) etc… So don’t be confused, there really isn’t any competition, but more a logical step to move from a browser world with a connected application, to running offline with the same data, to a fully integrated desktop application that can do so much more!

The Google Gears announcement has also been covered by -

Ryan Stewart
Mike Chambers (announcing SQLite in Apollo)

And in the press release.

How about an example?

Well to give you a taste of what’s possible Christophe Coenraets has released a Flex-based SQLAdmin for Google Gears with full source code. Remember to have Gears installed prior to running the example live on his domain.

Enjoy!
gdd07
gdd07au

This post is tagged in AIR, Flex, RIA, Web