Gears Sessions from Google I/O are now available to watch

6/13/2008 08:21:00 AM
Posted by Dion Almaer, Gears Team



We had a great time at Google I/O at the end of May, and there were plenty of Gears-related content. Fortunately, video cameras were at the ready, and all of the sessions have been published on YouTube.

I put together a playlist (embedded player above) of the Gears content which includes:

• Improving Browsers in New Ways: Gears++
• Google Gears for Mobile
• HTML 5, Brought to You by Gears
• Gears and MySpace - Search on the Client
• Taking Large-Scale Applications Offline
• Gears Case Studies

Also, you may be interested in other Ajax related content such as:

GWT

• Using GWT to Build a Diagramming Tool
• GWT and Client-Server Communication
• GWT Extreme by Ray Cromwell
• JavaScript and DOM Programming in GWT
• Resource Bundles and Linkers in GWT
• Deferred Binding with GWT

General Ajax

• Alex Russell on “Can We Get There from Here?”
• Spice up Your Apps with Google AJAX APIs
• Yours truly, Dion and Ben, State of Ajax: The Universe Is Expanding
• Steve Yegge on Server Side JavaScript

Fly, Gears 0.3!

6/11/2008 10:08:00 PM
Posted by Aaron Boodman, Gears Engineer

Well, that's it, Gears 0.3 has officially left the nest. Most users have now been updated to 0.3.24.0. If you haven't, you can update at gears.google.com.

It seemed like just yesterday we were announcing 0.2. But here we are again, with great new features like:

• Support for Firefox 3!
• Ability to create desktop shortcuts
• Improved support for customizing the installation flow and permission dialog
• Better support for sending complex objects to workers
• Detailed progress events for managed resource store updates
  
• And more...
  

*Sniff* ... They grow up so fast.

As always, please let us know what you think of the new APIs, and what you think still needs work. Or better yet, join the project and send us a patch.

And don't worry about us, we'll be fine. We've got to focus on 0.4. Soon enough, it too will spread its wings.

Appcelerator gives you Gears functionality out of the box

6/06/2008 04:52:00 PM
Posted by Dion Almaer, Gears Team

Jeff Haynie announced that the latest Appcelerator SDK supports Gears.

First, for those that haven't heard of Appcelerator, it is an open source "RIA" development toolkit that focuses on rich clients talking to services on the backend. You can think of it somewhat as a Flex-like framework built with Open Web technology.

We are seeing an interesting trend. At first, frameworks would wrap Gears semantics in something that makes sense for their audience of developers, which is great.

Appcelerator though does something a little different. It uses Gears under the hood to make your existing Appcelerator based application a better user experience.

This is what they say:

With the next release of the SDK, Appcelerator's javascript servicebroker will now automagically (and transparently) switch to using a Gears-enabled servicebroker when talking to your service-backend. That means your application will perform faster because the AJAX communication between client and server (especially for apps using fast polling) will be out-of-process using Gears' worker pool.

You have to do nothing to enable this in your application. When you Appcelerator application loads, a small piece of code will check to see if Gears is enabled and will dynamically load the gears-enabled servicebroker code.

I am looking forward to seeing applications that use this in the wild.

In other news, they also wrote up a nice post on how you can use Appcelerator and App Engine in a very simple way.