Recently a trend about enabling web apps to be used offline started to emerge and a few companies announced their solutions: Dojo Offline Toolkit, Joyent Slingshot, Zimbra desktop and even Firefox 3.
Today Google released the beta of Google Gears. A browser plugin (700K) and API that enables developers to create web applications that can be used offline and provides 3 components to do this
- A local server, to cache and serve application resources
- A database (SQL Lite), to store and access data from within the browser
- A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background
The plugin is available for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera on Windows, Mac and Linux.
The first app to support offline capabilites using Google Gears is Google Reader and the rest of the Google apps like Docs, Groups I'm sure will be next.
Google Gears is opensource and licensed under the New BSD license. with this, many developers will be tempted to include in their projects, so we can expect a lot of web apps offering this capability even if the model is not adecuate to be used offline.
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