KludgeHack

Google Gears - The new runtime in town

Google finally entered Microsoft and Adobe competition in the RIA (Rich Internet Application) by introducing Google Gears.

Google Gears is nothing more that a small (700K) runtime that allows any website to benefit from its offline capabilities, local isolated storage and faster Javascript (asynchronous).

The runtime is available for Windows Vista, Linux and Mac. Also, the code is available via the new BSD Licence.

Some of Google’s applications are already supporting this technology, mainly Google Reader, and there notable increase of speed in them.

The picture on the right shows the dialog that pops up to let you know that Google gears is going to be storing data locally.

The data is stored in a SQLite database, and the web application can use Javascript to CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) the data.

You can easily use SQLite tools to browse the database.

Here’s a snippet of Javascript that is used to detect if Google Gears in installed. There are three (currently) different ways to do this, one for each of the supported browsers: Firefox, IE and Safari.

  var factory = null;

  // Firefox
  if (typeof GearsFactory != ‘undefined’) {
    factory = new GearsFactory();
  } else {
    // IE
    try {
      factory = new ActiveXObject(‘Gears.Factory’);
    } catch (e) {
      // Safari
      if (navigator.mimeTypes[“application/x-googlegears”]) {
        factory = document.createElement(“object”);
        factory.style.display = “none”;
        factory.width = 0;
        factory.height = 0;
        factory.type = “application/x-googlegears”;
        document.documentElement.appendChild(factory);
      }
    }
  }

Here are some websites with more information:

• Google Gears Developer site
• Google Gears Frequently asked questions
• Google Gears Developer Forum

A Gears Tutorial is available that illustrates the basic concepts. You may also find the Google Gears sample applications useful. Source code for these samples can be downloaded in a zip file found on the same page.

The runtime looks pretty good. I will try to explore more soon.

Let’s see how this will fit in the current Silverlight vs Apollo vs Flash space.