Google Gears Lets Developers Take Apps Offline

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

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.

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

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!

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.

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

Thank you Google.

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

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

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

How does this compare to Joyents Slingshot product?

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

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!

Cool.

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.

You misspelled “outlining” as “outlinging”.

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

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

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.

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

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

“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.

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.

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?

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

nice~~

Google Rock!!!

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 ?

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.

Damn Google, the’ve stolen my idea

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

i love google man i love it

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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….

another good developer oriented application from google

Great !!! I will try it . Thanks

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!

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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