Gears (software)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Gears | |
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| Developed by | |
| OS | Windows 2000, XP & Vista, Windows Mobile 5, Windows Mobile 6,Mac OS X, Linux |
| License | BSD |
| Website | http://gears.google.com/ |
Gears, formerly Google Gears,[1] is beta software offered by Google to enable offline access to services that normally only are available online. It installs a database engine, based on SQLite, on the client system to cache the data locally. Gears-enabled pages use data from this local cache rather than from the online service. Using Gears, a web application may periodically synchronize the data in the local cache with the online service. If a network connection is not available, the synchronization is deferred until a network connection is established. Thus Gears enables web applications to work even though access to the network service is not present.
Released under the BSD license,[2] Gears is free and open source software.
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[edit] Overview
Gears installs a browser extension that adds a JavaScript API that enables the browser scripts to access the local datastore. The extension requires Firefox or Internet Explorer (or derivatives) and works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.[3] A version for Safari is now available to developers. Currently, Google Reader and Google Docs are the only Google applications supported, though other web applications such as Remember the Milk, Zoho, MySpace (for mail search), and Wordpress (currently in trunk and for speed increases rather than offline access) have added Gears functionality.[4] The transition from online to offline mode and back has to be done manually in Google Reader because of the differences in data being transferred. Other applications, such as Remember the Milk, transition from online to offline mode and back seamlessly.
[edit] Components
There are three major API components to Gears
- A local server that caches and serves application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc).[5]
- A database (powered by SQLite) that stores the data offline.[6]
- A worker thread pool that synchronizes data in the background.[7]
[edit] Support
Using a Greasemonkey script created by one of the Gears engineers, Gears can be enabled on sites where it is otherwise unsupported.[8]
Opera ASA announced that the new Opera 9.5 will support Gears.[9]
[edit] See also
- Google Reader
- Google Docs
- Remember the Milk
- Mozilla Prism
- Rich Internet application
- Zoho Writer
- Buxfer
[edit] References
- ^ Happy birthday,
GoogleGears!. Official Google Blog (2008-05-28). Retrieved on 2008-06-11. - ^ Google Gears Google Code project. Retrieved on 2008-02-26.
- ^ What browsers and operating systems are supported by Google Gears?. Retrieved on 2007-05-31.
- ^ General Info: About Google Gears. Retrieved on 2008-05-07.
- ^ LocalServer Module API. Retrieved on 2007-05-31.
- ^ Database Module API. Retrieved on 2007-05-31.
- ^ WorkerPool Module API. Retrieved on 2007-05-31.
- ^ GearsMonkey: Google Gears + Greasemonkey to take Wikipedia offline. Retrieved on 2008-06-11.
- ^ Opera extends Gears support. Opera Software. Retrieved on 2008-05-29.
[edit] External links
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