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| Gears | |
|---|---|
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| Developed by | |
| Initial release | 0.3 / June 06, 2008 |
| OS | Windows 2000, XP & Vista, Windows Mobile 5, Windows Mobile 6,Mac OS X, Linux |
| License | BSD |
| Website | http://gears.google.com/ |
Gears, formerly Google Gears,[1] is beta software offered by Google to enable offline access to services that normally only are available online. It installs a database engine, based on SQLite, on the client system to cache the data locally. Gears-enabled pages use data from this local cache rather than from the online service. Using Gears, a web application may periodically synchronize the data in the local cache with the online service. If a network connection is not available, the synchronization is deferred until a network connection is established. Thus Gears enables web applications to work even though access to the network service is not present.
Released under the BSD license,[2] Gears is free and open source software.
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Components
There are several major API components to Gears:
- A Database module (powered by SQLite) that stores the data offline.[3]
- A WorkerPool module that provides parallel execution of JavaScript code.[4]
- A LocalServer module that caches and serves application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc).[5]
- A Desktop module that lets web applications interact more naturally with the desktop.[6]
Support
There are a number of web applications that use Gears. These applications come from a variety of companies, including Google (Docs / Reader / Picasa), MySpace (Mail Search), Zoho (Writer), Remember The Milk, and Buxfer.[7]
WordPress has support for Gears in the latest version, to speed up the administrative interface and reduce server hits. [8]
Gears can be enabled on sites where it is otherwise unsupported, by using a Greasemonkey script created by one of the Gears engineers.[9]
Opera ASA announced that the new Opera 9.5 will support Gears.[10]
Gears on Rails framework supporting interfaces to Gears without needing to understand the Google Gears API.[11]
See also
- Google Reader
- Google Docs
- Remember the Milk
- Mozilla Prism
- Rich Internet application
- Zoho Writer
- MySpace
- Buxfer
- WordPress
References
- ^ "Happy birthday,
GoogleGears!". Official Google Blog (2008-05-28). Retrieved on 2008-06-11. - ^ "Google Code project for Gears". Retrieved on 2008-02-26.
- ^ "Database Module API". Retrieved on 2007-05-31.
- ^ "WorkerPool Module API". Retrieved on 2007-05-31.
- ^ "LocalServer Module API". Retrieved on 2007-05-31.
- ^ "Desktop Module API". Retrieved on 2007-05-31.
- ^ "Gears History". Retrieved on 2008-06-28.
- ^ "WordPress Trac ticket - Gears Support".
- ^ "GearsMonkey: Google Gears + Greasemonkey to take Wikipedia offline". Retrieved on 2008-06-11.
- ^ "Opera extends Gears support". Opera Software. Retrieved on 2008-05-29.
- ^ "Google Gears Takes Ruby on Rails Offline". eWeek. Retrieved on 2008-07-15.
