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.
Components
There are several major API components to Gears:
- A Database module (powered by SQLite) that stores the data offline.[3]
- A WorkerPool module that provides parallel execution of JavaScript code.[4]
- A LocalServer module that caches and serves application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc).[5]
- A Desktop module that lets web applications interact more naturally with the desktop.[6]
Support
There are a number of web applications that use Gears. These applications come from a variety of companies, including Google (Docs / Reader / Picasa), MySpace (Mail Search), Zoho (Writer), Remember The Milk, and Buxfer.[7]
WordPress has support for Gears in the latest version, to speed up the administrative interface and reduce server hits. [8]
Gears can be enabled on sites where it is otherwise unsupported, by using a Greasemonkey script created by one of the Gears engineers.[9]
Opera ASA announced that the new Opera 9.5 will support Gears.[10]
Gears on Rails framework supporting interfaces to Gears without needing to understand the Google Gears API.[11]
See also
References
External links
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