Gadgetopia

Google Gears API Developer’s Guide: Gears is interesting. Here’s what it does, on the surface.

Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline.

But I think for some applications, this is going to be like a DVR. With a DVR, you always watch from the hard drive. With Gears, instead of working “live,” you’ll always work offline, and sync your changes back to the mothership.

Gears can be just a way to create “lazily connected” applications — they connect when they need to get or put data, but they’re otherwise self-contained. Think stateless desktop applications.

I’m also interested that they’re using SQLite. What an under-rated app that is. I’ve always been a big fan of SQLite.

Imagine putting Gears together with XUL. Woof.

Kudos to Google for open-sourcing this. They’re apparently trying to make a common framework so any organization’s apps can work offline, not just Google’s.