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.I am looking forward to seeing applications that use this in the wild.
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.
In other news, they also wrote up a nice post on how you can use Appcelerator and App Engine in a very simple way.
