If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Google is rolling out Google Gears to confront a big speed bump faced by all web based applications – the ability to work without an internet connection.

Google Gears (BETA) is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs:

• Store and serve application resources locally
• Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
• Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness

Don’t get overly excited now. Google Gears will not just automagically make your web app work offline. To take advantage of the offline features that Google Gears provides, you will have to add or change code in your web app.

There are three core modules provided by Gears:

1. LocalServer for storing and accessing application pages offline.
2. Database for storing and accessing application data on the user’s computer.
3. WorkerPool that helps in performing long-running tasks like code that will synchronize data between your server and the user’s computer.

Be sure to check out the:

• Gears Tutorial to learn the basic concepts.
• Sample Apps where you can also download the source code for the samples in a zip file from the same page.