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May 30, 2007

Google Gears Lets Developers Take Apps Offline

Nick Gonzalez

97 comments »

googgearslogo.pngTommorrow, Google will be hosting a developer day for 5,000 developers worldwide. The bulk of developers will be gathering at the San Jose convention center for a keynote by Google’s VP of Engineering, Jeff Huber. At the conference Google will be outlining their developer strategy. But the big announcement will be Google Gears, an open source browser plugin that will enable developers to create offline web applications using JavaScript APIs. As a developer, you’ll be able to make an application with the assurance that it will work offline and online across browsers.

The plugin is a 700K download for Firefox 1.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+ that installs three developer APIs. One API will handle the creation of data objects to store application information locally, another will be a SQLite relational database for searching the data, and the final part will enable asynchronous JavaScript so applications can sync data in the background without overburdening the browser. More info on the APIs are available at the gears website.

googreadgears.pngThe first demo of Gears will be for Google Reader, but more Google apps are expected to come. Reader will add a green download button to the user interface. When you click the button, Reader will download the last 2,000 messages to your computer, preparing your computer to work offline or under a spotty internet connection.

Downloading will take place in the background, using the asynchronous JavaScript API. While offline you can read these articles and carry out your usual sharing and tagging. When you get back online, just click the button and Reader will sync your offline activity with their server. Right now the syncing is initiated manually, but it’s easy to see that it will become more seamless as the program develops. Gears could conceivably solve the large data overhead problems of Google’s AJAX applications, pushing updates to your desktop instead of slowing down your browser.

Google is releasing opensource and early to developers to get some preliminary feedback. They are also collaborating with a host of other partners such as Opera, Mozilla, and Adobe, which will to integrate flash and Apollo into their system.

Robert Scoble (coverage) and Artur Bergman (coverage) were also at the press event.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Jason Alba

    May 30th, 2007 at 5:02 pm

    Another awesome announcement - the trend and message is clear “Let them come and develop - we’ll play nice.” Very cool.

    Jason Alba
    CEO - JibberJobber.com
    Because unemployment sucks

  2. rydawg

    May 30th, 2007 at 5:14 pm

    This is pretty cool. I have been using google apps for a few months now and the ability to deal with a bad connection every now and then will be great. Seems like now we just get the masses to help w/ dev work.

  3. Satish

    May 30th, 2007 at 5:17 pm

    Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers… * infinity *.

  4. PaulC

    May 30th, 2007 at 5:41 pm

    Its clear that Google understands that the next battle will be fought on the desktop with online applications. Google earth and now offline web apps are clear indicators.

    Thanks for the API Google!

  5. Ash Smith

    May 30th, 2007 at 5:55 pm

    Great… I wonder how this compares to the dojo offline toolkit. I’d say having a browser plugin would offer alot more control. Also small typo in post Nick.

    At the conference Google will be outlinging their their developer strategy.

  6. Project

    May 30th, 2007 at 5:55 pm

    My weekly 4 hour train journey just got sooooo much more interesting.

    Thank you Google.

  7. heptaro

    May 30th, 2007 at 6:09 pm

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    ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒

  8. Steven Price

    May 30th, 2007 at 6:20 pm

    Hmm, where’s that thumbs down button when I need it.

  9. extensions forklift

    May 30th, 2007 at 6:31 pm

    heh - Sounds wonderful -

    Scrybe had this feature on their on.offline calendar - the sych option

    this however seems to take that to the next level

  10. Rishi

    May 30th, 2007 at 6:58 pm

    Isn’t this kinda of like Silver Light and Adobe Apollo ?

  11. Ted

    May 30th, 2007 at 7:08 pm

    How does this compare to Joyents Slingshot product?

  12. Lex

    May 30th, 2007 at 7:10 pm

    I can’t wait till the offline version of Mahalo rolls out. That will be hawt!

  13. Sheif Mansour

    May 30th, 2007 at 7:15 pm

    I am sitting here at Google Developer Day in Sydney and they have just announced this and showed us a simple demo of writing an application that works both offline and online. Its defiantly a huge breakthrough in solving the problems to have apps work both offline and online.

    We had the presentation from the guy who made the greacemonkey extension as he played a big part in the team for Google.

    This is top stuff!

  14. Coleman Foley

    May 30th, 2007 at 7:19 pm

    Cool.

  15. Peter

    May 30th, 2007 at 7:58 pm

    This will be great, once it matures and becomes widespread. GMail would benefit from this too, as you could potentially backup your mail on your own computer without even using a POP3 client.

    Also, any competition with Apollo and SilverLight will be good.

  16. Evan Prodromou

    May 30th, 2007 at 8:37 pm

    You misspelled “outlining” as “outlinging”.

    Please delete this comment when it’s fixed, or if I’m mistaken.

  17. Michael S. Manley

    May 30th, 2007 at 9:35 pm

    For anyone wondering how this affects the Dojo Offline product:

    May 30th, 2007 - Google, Dojo, and SitePen announce porting effort to move the Dojo Offline APIs on top of Google Gears. The current download is using the older Dojo Offline runtime, which we will be deprecating moving into the future. The ported Dojo Offline will be available in two weeks.

    – from http://dojotoolkit.org/offline

  18. Vijeesh

    May 30th, 2007 at 10:16 pm

    This is awesome. With Gears, Google Docs & Spreadsheets can dent the market share of Microsoft Office. That will be huge. One won’t even need to purchase an Office suite.

  19. Kishore Nagarigari

    May 30th, 2007 at 10:35 pm

    This is one much expected that Google buddy will be doing. I hope I was there at San Jose convention center :(

    The future is here ” WEB ”

    Cheers,
    Kishore Nagarigari
    UID
    http://www.kishorem.com

  20. Kishore Nagarigari

    May 30th, 2007 at 10:36 pm

    Oops… there is typo there its not kishorem… http://www.kishoreN.com

  21. Velioncho

    May 30th, 2007 at 10:37 pm

    “One won’t even need to purchase an Office suite.”

    Please, dont compare Google docs and spreadsheets to MSFT office suite.We had this discussion so many times and docs&spread is miles behind office.

  22. Wes

    May 30th, 2007 at 10:50 pm

    Having an application that works both online and offline is quite cool but even better its the fact that it will work on both the major browsers - Firefox and IE.

  23. sally

    May 30th, 2007 at 11:01 pm

    Why haven’t you published anything on Apple’s use of Signature files in their non-DRM protected music? Its a huge story and you missed it.

    See Bob Leftsetz email below.

    In case you’ve been out of the Net loop, when you buy an UNRESTRICTED track at the iTunes Store, it comes with your NAME and E-MAIL address EMBEDDED!

    How could they think they could get away with it? Are they really this afraid, this desperate, willing to do ANYTHING to protect their old business model?

  24. scruffydan

    May 30th, 2007 at 11:26 pm

    while google docs and spreadsheets still lags behind MS office in terms of features, not being able to use them while offline was their biggest weakness. If this solved that problem then google docs and spreadsheets have one bog step closer to being good enough for most users

  25. fire3

    May 31st, 2007 at 12:18 am

    nice~~

  26. Myo Kyaw Htun

    May 31st, 2007 at 12:45 am

    Google Rock!!!

  27. Eric

    May 31st, 2007 at 2:40 am

    So now Google is saying that you have to install something on your computer (a browser plugin)…
    Have they changed their concept of web applications ?

  28. PaulC

    May 31st, 2007 at 3:19 am

    Eric,
    This has been a long time coming, its just a step on the path.
    Google desktop,
    Picassa,
    Earth,
    etc.

    I think that Google is definitly changing the concept of a web application, but it has been coming for a while, its not new. Users want their own local data store and a faster UI. Yes its nice to be able to go into an internet cafe and access your (G)mail, but there are some things that you dont need at the internet cafe and that you want to access faster and with a more advanced UI.

    This API starts to bridge the desktop/web gap and allows web developers to start getting on the desktop with the smallest possible learning curve.

  29. Nils Hitze

    May 31st, 2007 at 5:27 am

    Damn Google, the’ve stolen my idea ;)

  30. Matt Brian

    May 31st, 2007 at 6:06 am

    It was a nice surprise to see the “Offline” link appear in my Reader, more useful stuff from Google.

  31. video

    May 31st, 2007 at 6:32 am

    i love google man i love it

  32. Steve Poland

    May 31st, 2007 at 6:34 am

    Hopefully Gmail is next on Google’s list for offlining!

  33. youtubesearcher

    May 31st, 2007 at 7:04 am

    Including SQLite is a really great idea. All the other toolkits provide you a way to store stuff, but usually treated by the toolkit as some big opaque blog. Now you will have the real power of an RDB to code too, great.

  34. Edinburgh Computer Services

    May 31st, 2007 at 7:33 am

    It’s a fantastic news for providers of on-line applications, Microsoft won’t be too keen. If they had, they would of developed this a couple of years ago. They will of course jump on the bandwagon, actually I do think they are developing something at the moment, I forget the name. Anyone
    Jamie

  35. Project

    May 31st, 2007 at 8:56 am

    I am praying that the Safari plugin works on the iPhone. One would guess it will given Apples close ties with Google. Being able to access my Gmail/Reader offline on the iPhone would be a huge thing for me.

  36. Neal Goldman

    May 31st, 2007 at 9:27 am

    Interesting but not revolutionary. This is just an extension of google’s RIA strategy and of everyone’s realization that the browser as it was designed sucks for real apps. What’s the big difference between a desktop app that uses web services to interact with a back-end or an offline oriented browser that uses a desktop framework to cache data?

    Gears won’t come without a fight from Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo and Adobe. At the heart of this, we’re just fighting the nextgen OS war. He who controls the application framework controls the desktop. Whether it’s a .NET/Silverlight framework, Adobe’s Apollo framework or Google’s framework, the goal is the same as Microsoft and Apple have had for years. Get the developer onto your platform so your platform dominates. Microsoft doesn’t want to give up its hard-won dominant position and every one else wants to be king. Why do we think that Google, if it wins, would be a beneficent monarch any more than Microsoft? It’s a big, complex company with many shareholders and employees each with different motivations.

    The fact is that as applications require more framework services, the framework bulks up and adds functionality that mirrors all the functionality currently found in Windows and OS X. We haven’t miraculously figured out a new way of building apps. We’re just porting our concepts to a new platform. Google’s just hoping the new platform is theirs.

  37. David Jacobs

    May 31st, 2007 at 10:46 am

    Can you say killer app? This is awesome. And Microsoft does a collective, oh crap! Love that touch table though.

  38. Andre de Cavaignac

    May 31st, 2007 at 3:36 pm

    Too bad that Javascript and HTML are horrible languages to write real applications in. I can already see the day when Windows Presentation Foundation is the new, “cool” and uncovered thing that everyone is raving about… This love of HTML and Javascript will just never make sense to me….

  39. nomadicalloy

    May 31st, 2007 at 5:07 pm

    another good developer oriented application from google

  40. Eiwot

    May 31st, 2007 at 8:01 pm

    Great !!! I will try it . Thanks

  41. Ramesh

    May 31st, 2007 at 10:31 pm

    Cool. Yet another indipendant validation of richer desktops. While GoogleGears is predominantly pitching offline apps, this is a full fledged browser-based app platform. Even if the Gears’ capabilities will be limited to just JavaScript. Thi sis probably where platforms like Adobe Apollo and Pramati’s Dekoh differ- by offering a full fledged applications platform for the desktop leveraging existing web programming languages. (web-desktops). This enables a much bigger class and range of apps possible on the desktops. And Dekoh with its sync and managed-app capabilities enable simpler offline and rich-desktop apps.
    (More at-
    http://jroller.com/page/ramesh.....w_onto_web)

    On the whole, momentum gathering in the web-desktops space! Way to go!

  42. Asim

    May 31st, 2007 at 11:46 pm

    *
    **
    ****
    *******
    GOOGLE ROCKS!
    **************************
    *********************************************

  43. bdb

    June 1st, 2007 at 7:16 am

    Ramesh, just keep telling yourself that. Notice the Adobe partnership mentioned at the bottom? Don’t worry, there will be availability for more obscure players to have have 1-2% mkt share, if you are lucky. Good luck.

  44. WebGyver

    June 1st, 2007 at 7:27 am

    Thanks for taking the time to write about this.

    Just in case you or anyone else is interested, there’s a guy called Rusty who also did a very nice job taking Google Gears out for a test spin. You can read his tutorial with step-by-step instructions at: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/013657.html

    And there’s a really cool dude, called Nick, who actually developed a working Google Gears solution to cache WordPress in PHP. You can read about his endeavors at: blog.assembleron.com/2007/05/31/google-gears-caching-of-wordpress-in-php/#comment-2943

    Finally, the guys at Ajaxian also started developing some Google Gears stuff for RSS, and you can read about it at: ajaxian.com/archives/rss-bling-goes-offline-with-google-gears

    Thanks again,

    WebGyver
    ————————————————————
    Making web stuff out of bubble gum and kitchen chemicals.
    http://www.webgyver.info

  45. Sean

    June 1st, 2007 at 9:29 am

    this is a great product they have released and i wanted something like this for google reader so i can now download all my rss feeds before i head off to uni in the mornings and read the feeds at my will when not connected to the net.

    http://seanprice.net

  46. Uriel Katz

    June 3rd, 2007 at 1:43 am

    i wrote a ORM on top of Google Gears,link here:http://www.urielkatz.com/archive/detail/3/

  47. beyondwww

    June 14th, 2007 at 11:36 pm

    Bdb - Well you are very right Google has been very much in our lives but people are smart to understand what is cool and what is not. Google has given us many amazing products and its really difficult to imagine a life without it(Ranks 3rd in the traffic ranking globally). But Google has not been successful with all its products and others have eaten up the major chunk of the market segment for the segment. I say Apollo and Dekoh both have fair chances to keep Google Gears on a low note.

  48. sami

    June 25th, 2007 at 2:25 am

    I wonder, if this is really gonna be a browser based web applications, its still a long way to go, but still a good piece of work. I am more accustomed to it. I feel it easy with this offline web application.

    Regards
    Sami
    http://brainobeast.wordpress.com

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