Al anuncio de que Firefox 3.0 permitirá la ejecución de aplicaciones tanto online como offline,
convirtiéndose en una plataforma alternativa para los desarrolladores, se une el anuncio de
Google Gears que viene a ser un añadido para llevar estas mismas funcionalidades a cualquier
navegador.
Las proximas aplicaciones web funcionarán online y offline y los desarrolladores conseguirán
esta funcionalidad apoyándose en firefox 3.0, google gears, o similares
Google Kicks Offline Web Apps Into Gear
Martin LaMonica, CNET News.com
Google engineers have enabled what Internet surfers for years have
yearned for -- Web applications that work offline. The goal of Google
Gears is to create a single, standardized way to add offline capabilities
to Web applications. Google expects to have a consumer-ready release of
Google Gears, which will be under 1 megabyte in size, "within months."
It also expects to submit the code to a standards body so that it will
eventually be built into all standards-compliant browsers. According to
the web site: "Google Gears is an open source browser extension that
lets developers create web applications that can run offline. Gears
provides three key features: (1) A local server, to cache and serve
application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing
to contact a server; (2) A database, to store and access data from within
the browser; (3) A worker thread pool, to make web applications more
responsive by performing expensive operations in the background. The
LocalServer module allows a web application to cache and serve its HTTP
resources locally, without a network connection. It is a specialized
URL cache that the web application controls. Requests for URLs in the
LocalServer's cache are intercepted and served locally from the user's
disk. The Database module is used to persistently store an application
user's data on the user's computer. Data is stored using the same-origin
security policy, meaning that a web application cannot access data
outside of its domain. Data is stored and retrieved by executing SQL
statements. For information on the SQL syntax supported, see the SQLite
document "SQL as Understood By SQLite", and also local modifications
to SQLite, below. Google Gears includes SQLite's full-text search
extension fts2. Google Gears [Beta] works on the following browsers:
Apple Mac OS X (10.2 or higher) with Firefox 1.5 or higher, Linux with
Firefox 1.5 or higher, and Microsoft Windows (XP or higher) with Firefox
1.5 or higher and Internet Explorer 6 or higher. Additionally, the team
is working on supporting Safari on Mac OS X in a future release."
http://news.com.com/2100-7345_3-6187596.html
See also the Google Gears web site: http://gears.google.com/