In this presentation from QCon San Francisco 2007, Rajeev Dayal discusses building applications with GWT and Google Gears. Topics discussed include an overview of GWT, integrating GWT with other frameworks, GWT 1.4 features, developing large GWT applications, integrating GWT and Google Gears, the architecture of a Google Gears application, Google Gears features and the Google Gears API.
Google seems to be no longer interested in further developing Gears, promoting HTML 5 instead.
With the W3C working on a specification that defines an API for providing scripted access to geographical location information, Mozilla recently announced built-in Geolocation support for Firefox 3.5. This is aligned with an earlier announcement from Opera that also adds support for Geolocation in their browser. Will this make geographically aware applications ubiquitous?
After one year, some argue that "Gears" seems to be shifting its focus from enabling off-line Web applications to accelerating the development of new features to the Web, sometimes competing with HTML 5 and using an unfair competitive advantage: a browser in the browser. What do you think?
PersistJS, a JavaScript framework enabling client-side data storage, was released last week by Paul Duncan. MySpace also made an announcement at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco this week that they are now using Gears for message searching. With the Gears solution in place, full-text searches are performed on the client side.
Zoho, a online office productivity software company, recently extended its flagship AJAX based RIA product Zoho Writer with offline capabilities using Google Gears. InfoQ.com spoke to Raju Vegesna of Zoho to learn more about the process.
The Google Gears team recently blogged about their roadmap and development process. It covers what the focus will be for the next few months and emphasizes their plan to keep Gears' development out in the open. The first (official) version of the GearsORM project has also been released.
As part of their developer days activities this week Google announced a new offline web application API Google Gears.
