1st Minute: What is Google Gears ?

If you want to run your web application offline,Google has released an open source lightweight browser extension which works with Firefox and IE (will work with Safari very soon).

You can download gears and start using Google apps like Google Reader which gives offline functionality using Gears.

2nd Minute : How web apps work when you are online ?

Before moving to the offline world, let’s briefly explore the essential components of online web application.

You need a Web server which is a software that handles requests across the Internet for Web pages, pictures, and related files.

You also need a system that stores data like login details or exam results. This system may be a flat file or database management system like MySQL which supports SQL language that helps you to delete ,insert or update the data.

All Web applications have some tasks that take a fair amount of time to run. These long running requests can eat server resources and increase the response time.So I need something that takes these long running process in background so that response time is minimally affected.

3rd Minute : Now ,what happens when you go offline ?

You don’t have access to your remote web server now. But you still need similar components which we discussed above to run your web application locally. Google Gear basically is the combination of these three components : –

Instead of webserver,you have LocalServer in Gears which acts as a cache and serve Web pages, pictures, and related files locally.You can talk to the LocalServer with a javascript API.

Google Gears contains a browser level relational database based on Open source SQLite that is again accessible to you with JavaScript.It provides full text Search and you can almost use your favourite SQL to talk to your local database.

The WorkerPool takes resource intensive database operations to the background that slows down the stuff happening on your browser screen. When again going online and synchronizing with the server ,it should not overwhelm my web application.

Do you have more than 3 minutes for this stuff ?

Great,but,before you jump to the official Google Gears developer page for going little deeper or browsing code,here’s a list of other cool Gears introductory tutorials to get you started…

• Check out nice introduction of database related aspect of Gears by Jack Herrington in his article The Power of Google Gears (Part 1)




• Mike Malone has written a Getting started with Google Gears article in which he talks about all three components of Gears with some code snippets.




• IntelliBitz has a presentation at slideshare for a little advanced introduction to Google Gears.




• Dumb Little Man has various ideas for possible applications of Google Gears in his article How Google Gears Will Change Your Life

P.S. I have been trying to solve daily "real" issues which educators face while integrating technology in their curriculum. Click one of the icons on the right sidebar to join the growing community of educators reading this blog by RSS or by email...