Japanese Gears
Gregor Hohpe gave a nice report on Google Gears Live From Japan, at a “Google Developer Roundtable” event. Gregor was at the event focusing on Gears and gave a presentation on the topic:
When giving a presentation about Google Gears, what would be better than actually making a Gears application that renders the presentation? That’s what the sample application, that comes with Google Gears, does. It reads a text file into the local SQLite database and renders the presentation from the database records. On slide 10 of my updated presentation you can cache all application resources (e.g., images, JavaScript files, CSS files, etc) in the resource manager and run the presentation offline (naturally, following this link requires Gears). I demonstrated that feature during the talk by pulling the network cable right after synchronizing. Thank god it worked. I hope it shows on the video! I uploaded the presentation application with all supporting files to the code.google.com subversion repository.
He also had some pointers for the future, with a good link to an architecture doc:
Developers also pointed out that the Gears API’s are relatively low level building blocks, making more guidance and advice from Google essential. A recent article on the Gears Architecture clearly points this direction. This is a topic close to my heart. I want to make sure that developing rich and responsive browser apps is not reserved for hard core hackers and JavaScript junkies. While the “competition” (a good friend of mine, actually) has been getting a lot of air time regarding Democratizing the Cloud, it’s equally important for Google to bring Web development to the masses. A little voice in my head tells me that there may be some interesting design patterns for these types of applications waiting to be documented. AJAX Design Patterns is a good step into that direction, but Gears has fundamentally changed the landscape for AJAX development.
