Google Launches Google Gears
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Google has taken another step forward to bring web users the holy grail – offline web applications.
Google launched Google Gears today. Per their website,
” 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 “ |
So you may be wondering what does this mean? Take Google Spreadsheets for example. Right now it is annoying if you are offline. When you are online editing your sheets, you need to remember to export it to a physical file on your machine so you can continue working on it. When you are online you have to upload it again. Google doesn’t know that it is the same doc or a new one. How nice would it be to simply open your sheet, work on it, synch online (if you are online) or keep it offline when you are offline? Tremendously easier and transparent.
This is big. This is another shot across the bow of Microsoft. The code is expected to be under 1MB!
The software itself has three components–a local Web server which runs in the browser, the open-source database SQLite for storage, and browser extensions that will allow multiple JavaScript jobs to run in parallel.
No doubt this is going to lead to new startups around this technology. Bad news yet again for Microsoft. The entire Office Suite is under attack. I use activeCollab, an open-source project management tool that is web-based. The biggest downside is I have to be online or have the entire thing running on my laptop. If someone took the software and extended it to a web/desktop model I would be tremendously happy.
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Blogging with Desi Baba said:
Microsoft needs to improve their software anyways, and they wont do it aggressively without a competitor. Google’s technology is incredible and fast. I think this will get Microsoft running to improve their products.
June 2nd, 2007 at 3:16 pm -
Dax Desai said:
Microsoft will just come up with a bastardized version of their existing products such as web outlook. Its still clunky. Consider alternatives like Zimbra which has more features than Outlook and scales much better for example.
I use hosted Gmail for my businesses. It works great. I have no headache of administration. I am very excited about the Google Gears development. Imagine what will happen when they deploy it to interface with Gmail. At that point I can get rid of my 3rd party software that downloads Gmail for offline access.
We are approaching a point where businesses will simply deploy a browser with some extensions and everything will be web-based. I like to follow that model as it is easiest for me to administer my users. This will be big and I fully expect some work with vendors such as Salesforce.com and other hosted app providers. This is a huge step in the application space. Google HUGE!
June 3rd, 2007 at 10:46 am
[...] that will take Google Sheets dangerously close to challenge MS Excel is to integrate Google Gears. Google Gears allows web apps to have offline functionality and sync back when online again. I believe this will [...]