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Jun

12

Google Releases Gears 0.3

Filed Under technology |

I am really excited about Gears. Let me first start by clearing this up, Google has “opened” Gears, and removed their name from the application, so no, its not Google Gears, its just simply Gears. The big news for me in this release is the new support for Firefox 3! Although, I am going to be more excited when they support Safari. (They already support IE).

Whats so exciting about Gears? Its not simply a way to make your web applications run offline, its about empowering today’s web applications with tomorrow’s technology, literally. Someday, we’ll all be able to bask in the glory of HTML 5, with its data-persistence capabilities, SVG support, canvas support, etc etc. But, we all know how slow the world of browsers can be! Google has decided to step in and lend a hand.

Gearheads
Gears is all about enabling all browsers (including mobile browsers) with the features and capabilities of HTML5, without having to wait! Think of it like a browser plug-in that allows you to time travel to the future of web application development.

Not only is Gears providing these features, they are doing their absolute best to stay as close to the implementation specification as possible. They hope, that one day, you’ll be able to simply switch off your Gears libraries and all your code will run natively in the browser, no Gears needed. You can partially do this today, most of the data persistence specification is already baked into the latest versions of webkit, the Gears API is mirroring the exact same implementation to make “upgrading” to the native environment as easy as possible.

JavaScript “threading”
I say “threading”, because its not truly threading support, but Gears has the ability to provide your JavaScript applications with “worker pools” that allow for concurrent processing and better utilization of your computer processor, directly in the browser! There has also been talk of being able to make “runtime specific” worker pools so you can write JavaScript 2.0 code that will work, in browser!

Offline Support
Everyone pretty much gets the idea behind this one, it works well, but really, this is not a feature that I am very interested in providing through my web applications these days.

Desktop Shortcuts
The latest release of Gears (0.3) adds the ability to make a nice favicon-powered desktop shortcut with just a few lines of JavaScript, a neat little feature, especially if you are utilizing the offline support functionality.\
So, there is a little overview of some of the features I find most interesting about Gears. Wordpress has just recently began embracing the technology to increase the performance of their app (worker pools), and so has MySpace! MySpace is using Gears’ database persistence capabilities to offload full-text indexing, of the user’s inbox, to their native processing power, rather than having to create a cluster of DB servers, snazzy! If you want to learn more about Gears, check out the google code page.


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3 Comments so far

  1. zinking on June 13, 2008 7:00 am

    It’s really great achievement, Thanks for letting us know

  2. kirby.stephany on June 13, 2008 7:18 am

    Which doesn’t work on Firefox 3b5 (at least in Fedora Core 9).

  3. Derek P. on June 14, 2008 11:49 pm

    @kirby.stephany Have you tried running it on Firefox RC3 ? I believe it only works with the latest versions.