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.

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