Google Announces "Gears" Offline Support For Web Applications

Robert Scoble has the scoop. Google Developers day is in progress and on the first day Google has released a new technology called “Gears“ to enable offline support for web based applications. This is not a new technology it has been showcased before, it mostly based on JavaScript and Flash, now that Google has officially released a toolkit we can hope to see a wide spread adoption of offline support for other web applications.

What is Google Gears

Google Gears (BETA) is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs:

Store and serve application resources locally

Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database

Run asynchronous JavaScript to improve application responsiveness

Gears works on Macs, Windows, Linux on IE, Firefox. Opera support isn’t finished yet and Safari support will be coming “later.”

They have also released a new version of Google Reader Today which has offline support enabled. You’ll need to install the Gears Extension for your browser to see it in action.

If you are a developer head over to the developers page to see some demos and documentation.

Google has also released a A new Mashup editor that is aimed at developers familiar with HTML and JavaScript. The Google Mashup Editor offers a simpler way to deploy AJAX user interface components atop existing feeds and Google Web Services. This is currently a limited beta, so you’ll have to sign up and wait for it.