Google Gears Continues Momentum with ORM API and Support From Popular Javascript Projects

Posted by James Estes on Jul 19, 2007

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Google Gears

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 idea is to do all of our development and team collaboration in the open so that the community can keep updated on what we're doing and easily make contributions.

They provide detailed info on how to contribute to Gears including how to get the source and how to submit changes (patches) to the codebase.

Looking ahead

The team is focused primarily on 3 things for the next few months:

Cross-Origin API
This feature is really mash-up oriented. It will allow workers to be created from a different origin (ie an origin other than the current app). These workers will act as a service layer, allowing for messages to be sent to them even from workers loaded from a different origin. Sounds scary at first: what if your worker is providing some sensitive information? Well, workers must opt-in to being accessed this way by calling an allowCrossOrigin method.

Improved Worker Pool
Several things in the works here, the most significant is adding support for Gears HttpRequests which would allow workers to make network requests.

Internationalized full text search support
The full text search support is nice, the goal on the roadmap is to have it also support Japanese, Arabic, and Russian.

Other Gear-Related Sightings In the Wild

Dojo Offline has a new beta release with some nice Gears tools:

• An offline widget that you can easily embed in your web page with just a few lines of code, automatically providing the user with network feedback, sync messages, offline instructions, and more.
• A sync framework to help you store actions done while offline and sync them with a server once back on the network.
• Automatic network and application-availability detection to determine when your application is on- or off-line so that you can take appropriate action.

Steve Yen has released an update to TrimPath Junction with support for Gears.

The final piece of the puzzle is Google Gears. Gears now makes the 3 year old (gah!) vision of Junction now practical by adding a client-side RDBMS and offline capabilities into the mix.

The first (official) version of the GearsORM project was released. This appears to be the first ORM tool for Gears to hit the web.