It has been a week and change since we announced Google Gears.
We've been pretty busy responding to initial bugs, but we wanted to take a moment to summarize some of the great discussion and community involvement that has already started happening.
API Abstractions
One thing we've tried to do with Gears is go for evolution over revolution. This is why we have built focused components that you can then build on. We expected that people would build broader abstractions on top of Gears APIs, much as the community has built on top of XMLHttpRequest.It has already started:
- There has been a fair amount of playing with the Database component, and its APIs.
- gears-dblib allows you to work with objects/hashes, and wraps a few common patterns. Think selectAll(sql, function(row) {}).
- Gears ORM is more about Person.select(), and object-y. I am sure we will see a port of ActiveRecord and Hibernate shortly!
- GearShift ports ideas from ActiveRecord Migrations. We need to think about how to evolve the DB over time.
- Our own Aaron Boodman has done some experimentation with a convenience wrapper around the Worker Pool API.
Library Integration
We have seen Ajax libraries and frameworks start to support Gears:- Ext JS Gears Integration
- SQL Admin for Google Gears
- Aflax and Gears
- Flex and Google Gears: Christophe Coenraets has published the SalesForce automation tool used in the Gears keynote
- Dojo Offline runs on Gears. Brad Neuberg talks about his excitement over Gears, and where he sees things going.
Example Applications
- Google Reader was our first example of using Gears to take an application offline.
- Remember The Milk quickly outdid us with a very nice offline implementation including seamless background synchronization and full support for almost all their features.
- RSS Bling is a quick port of the RSS reader to work offline.
- DB Schema Editor is a nice implementation of drag and drop schema editing for Gears.
- Google Reader Gears Search adds search to Google Reader using Greasemonkey and the Gears full text search functionality.
Presentations, etc
We talked about Gears at Google Developer Day, and we have the presentations to prove it online at YouTube.- Aaron Boodman kicks it off in Australia
- Gears, Madrid Style
- Gears: Dojo and GWT
- If you fancy it in the queens english
Some people asked if the presentation we used is available anywhere to download, and in fact it is. The presentation is part of the downloadable SDK tools and samples which includes a variety of Gears samples.
We've also had the pleasure of giving some interviews about Gears. Here are a couple you can listen to:
- Linus Upson, engineering director for the Gears project, interviewed by ZDNet
- Mike Tsao, tech lead on Gears, on Google Code
We're all extremely excited to see the early interest in Gears and we're committed to responding to your feedback as quickly as possible and making this a robust and useful toolkit for web applications. Let us know what you think, what's missing, and where we should focus our efforts.
