Google released an offline Web delivery tool

With the official announcement of Google Gears - the "offline" Web-based application development toolkit, Google is trying to solve the most bony problem facing Web applications.

Google Gears was chosen to launch on Google Developer Day 2007, or Website Development World Festival, which is organized simultaneously by companies in 10 different countries.

Localization of resources

In a simplest way, Google Gears is an open source development product, allowing the conversion of hosted Web-based applications into a home desktop application. The Gears toolkit will solve all the problems of using Web applications when the computer is offline.

Gears' key function is to capture and localize the resources and resources of a Web application, such as the entire image, algorithm, interface .

The second important task of Gears is the ability to set up a local database that these Web applications can access.

" It's a rich database with full text search features and normal transaction capabilities ," said Linus Upson, Google Engineering Director.

The third feature of Google Gears allows developers to run JavaScript in a background task, through the multi-threaded feature of multi-core processors.

With this feature, developers can create a Web-based application with its desktop version at the same time, and both will synchronize with each other. Synchronization is considered a must-have feature for any "live" application in both platforms.

The future of Web applications?

Source: AP Google hopes developers will test Gears and send feedback to the company to continue to improve this toolkit. The company hopes that in the near future, Gears will become the common standard for providing offline access to Web-based applications.

" This effort is very interesting and also very big. It is the next step for the Web, " said Gartner analyst David M.Smith.

Google supporters at the moment include Adobe Systems, Mozilla and Opera Softwarem, although Google is still negotiating with some other IT businesses.

Obviously, absent from this list will be Microsoft, Google's biggest rival, which owns the world's most popular IE browser. " Microsoft will have to decide to join or develop a similar solution of its own ," Smith predicted.

In the first phase, Adobe will associate Gears' API with the Apollo platform. Apollo itself has been designed with the aim of building offline features for an online application.

For their part, browsers that compete with IE, Mozilla and Opera are actively collaborating with Google on the Gears project because they share a belief that new access to the Web is the future of Web applications.

Preeminence is hard to deny

Google has always been a strong backing force for the Web-based application model, also known as Web Services - a trend that is prevalent throughout the world throughout the year.

These applications exist on the network environment, located in the server of the enterprise providing so users can save time, maintenance costs, installation significantly compared to using software CDs and Private server.

Another advantage of Web services is that it allows many users to share documents with each other very easily, at the same time discussing and cooperating online anywhere, anytime, instead of every employee. Just plug and handle the file alone on the computer, then email each other and collect feedback.

However, there are still many challenges that the Web service model faces, including concerns about the reliability and "availability" of service servers, as well as on the security of sensitive data. of the business.

Another major problem is that many Web applications lack offline features, so users cannot access them in case the computer is not connected to the Internet. This is the point that Google Gears wants to solve.

" It is a major omission, one of the problems that people first mentioned in online applications ," Smith said. " However, Google Gears is not a universal key. There is still a lot of work to do in the future ."

Also yesterday, Google provided Offline access for its Reader Feed information management application. This is the first concrete example of what the development community can do (achieve) with Gears.

Although Reader is fine, according to Smith, it cannot create the same excitement that Google has with Gmail or Docs & Spreadsheets. Users will be able to download Gears from today on its website. This toolkit is compatible with all major browsers and operating systems today.

Trong Cam