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.

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

Featured Projects

• Remember The Milk
• Things (thn.gs)
• Buxfer
• Zoho Writer
• WordPress
• PassPack

External links

• Gears home page

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