There is a Buffalo New York autodealer that has these annoying commercials which consist of the dealer screaming back to his pitchmans every second line – THIS IS HUGE! So you will pardon me if I say the following about the following:
THIS IS HUGE!
Now why would Googles announcement of an Open API for supporting Offline browser operations be such a big deal ? Well perhaps because in the process of installing Google Gears users get a local web server, a database, and a threading message server. And it might be influential because it already has the support of Mozilla and Opera for their browsers. And when Adobe chimed in and said their AJAX, Flex and Apollo tools would support the Gears API – well that must have been music to the ears of Web developers worldwide who were introduced to Gears, Google Mashup Editor and Google Mapplets at 10 major cities throughout the World on May 30th and 31st.
Now besides security what is the other most critical feature that has been holding Web 2.0 Applications back ? Offline operations. Now dont confuse Offline Web applications with GUI Integration wars looming between Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun. GUI Integration is about delivering one GUI coding which can run on any OS PC desktop, on any Web browser, and on as many mobile and embbed device that has minimum qualifying display attributes. But their is one final ingredient to GUI Integration – such user interfaces have to be able to run online or offline or both. Hence its is very important that Adobe and 2 of the 3 major browser makers have signed onto Google Gears.
In the last few weeks it has become evident that Google and Microsoft are now walking around in the same boxing ring. So what will be interesting to see is how both Google and Microsoft present their views on how Google Gears fits in the Windows world. Stay tuned.
(c)JBSurveyer 2007 If you liked this, let others know:
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