This morning I checked out a new developer-oriented beta project from Google called Google Gears which boldly promises: “enabling offline apps.”

Google is trying to solve one of the deficiencies with JavaScript by enabling saving of data locally.

Pros
1. Runs on Windows XP, Vista, Mac OS X 10.2+, Linux
2. store and serve applications locally
3. store data in a local relational database
4. run asynchronous JavaScript calls locally
5. browser extension is open source. If anything bad is going on it will be spotted by the developer community.
6. Uses SQLite DB syntax. If you are familiar with SQLite use say with PHP, you’ll be able to get up to speed fairly quickly.

Cons
1. Everything must run in the browser. This could be a real deal breaker if you want to have a unique UI for your application. Google Gears should be viewed as a supplement to programs viewed in browsers.
2. Client must download and install the Google Gears browser extension. While it seems not much more than downloading and running a Firefox add-in, it is an exe file. Some users could be leery of downloading an exe. Will they get Google Toolbar? No. Will they get some other Google program they don’t want slowing down their browsing? No.
3. Client must approve execution of local saving to each application. There is a checkbox that is unchecked which will allow the client to allow all applications from the domain that looks like this:

4. for users (like myself) that frequently use multiple machines, I may not want local databases duplicated across each machine. Programs could (and should) offer people like me the option to choose which machine(s) to save local data and which ones not. There doesn’t appear to be any option yet (?) to allow me to access data from another Google Gears database on the network, nor is there any option yet for allowing sharing of resources from multiple domains on the user’s machine via source:

Sometimes web applications on different origins may want to share resources. We are investigating ideas for granting permissions across origins.

Developer links
Google Gears developer area
Google Gears Groups - 241 members as of this writing
First time Google Gears tutorial

Demo applications (these all require Google Gears installed)
Google provides four different demos:

1. database phrases - store user created phrases in a database
2. resource store - shows how to create an remove a ’store’ which is the equivalent of a local file save operation.
3. Managed resource demo - capture a collection of files online and store them together offline in a newly created store
4. Workerpool demo - shows how to run an expensive operation asynchronously

Possible real world uses
The first benefit that comes to mind when thinking about a Google Gears enabled environment are really power Office-like applications in the browser. I’m certain this is the primary motivator to get Google Gears installed everywhere. How long before this is installed as part of the Google Toolbar? I’m guessing not that long.

From a developer point of view being able to store more than you could store in a cookie could be very handy.

For example, let’s say you want to give your website visitors the ability to store searches they make on your website in their own searchable database offline any time. Or maybe you have a fun game you’d like them to be able to play offline and store their high scores. They can play the game and store the results of games in the database and then rejoin their highest score to the online server when they are back online.

How secure is the data? Google’s response:

Google Gears data files are protected with the user’s operating system login credentials. Users with separate login names cannot access each other’s Google Gears data files, as enforced by the operating system … two people using the same OS login could theoretically access each other’s Gears data files, just as they could access any other file on the machine.

Others are saying
I will continue to update this section as I find others saying interesting things about Google Gears today.

USA Today: “The Web is great but it doesn’t work very well when you don’t have a Web connection,” Jeff Huber, Google’s vice president of engineering, said in an interview. “Gears addresses a functional gap on the Web.”
Paul is receiving Google Gears sync errors.
GigaOm points out there is a new version of Google Reader with offline functionality. Another great use of offline functionality. The walls of “you must be connected to play” are breaking down.

Onward
I can see some interesting uses for Google Gears but need some more time to play around with it. Perhaps later today. Any readers built something with Google Gears yet?

Update 7:37am PST: Wow, there is also a Google Mashup Editor:

The Google Mashup Editor allows you to use HTML, Javascript, CSS and XML to create an infinite variety of applications with technology you are familiar with.

Lots of activity late yesterday!

Did this post make you go hmm?

Maybe Related Posts (plugin generated)

• Gears of Thursawday
• Jousting Joost
• code.google.com
• Now we can customize Google News
• Google offers specialized source code search
• Google Groups beta redeux