Gears API Blog
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Showing posts with label community. Show all posts
Showing posts with label community. Show all posts
WebGuild's Future of Web Apps Panel + Gears Boilerplate
Two quick updates from Gears land. First, we'll be talking this evening (January 16th) on WebGuild's Future of Web Apps panel here on the Google Mountain View campus. You can submit your questions through the web to have them asked tonight, even if you can't make it.
Second, Jeremy Moskovich has created a very useful Wiki page containing Gears Tutorials and Sample Code. The idea here is to have boilerplate for integrating Gears into different kinds of environments, such as .NET, JQuery, etc. Right now it is more of a template that is waiting to be filled out by the community, so if you have experience using Gears in a particular environment please add it to this page.
Google Gears and Personal Finance
Google Gears is about much more than just offline. With Gears, you can create websites that use the local server and database to accelerate performance and provide innovative new functionality.
We've been waiting to see web applications that use Gears to do much more than just offline. Buxfer, an interesting new personal finance web site, has a host of powerful features, such as auto-syncing with all of your banks and credit cards. One interesting feature is that they are using Google Gears. If a user chooses, they can have their personal finance data stored locally in the Gears database rather than on the remote server. This is very powerful -- you can now get the convenience of web applications, while retaining control over your personal data:
While synchronizing your financial accounts, you can save theVentureBeat has a great article and review on Buxfer. A snippet from VentureBeat concerning the Gears functionality:
authentication information offline on your computer using Google Gears.
Next time you click on 'Synchronize', Buxfer will use the information
stored in Google Gears, and you won't need to type it again.
You will have the convenience of not needing to login into your
financial institution repeatedly, as well as the peace of mind that
your private information is secure and completely under your control!
Like Mint and the others, Buxfer has introduced a way to let you easily synchronize your financial accounts from Bank of America, American Express, Citibank credit cards, Chase credit cards, and more than 300 others with your personal finance information on its site. It uses Google Gears to download your financial account information — your username and password — to an offline Buxfer component that lives on your computer, that syncs with your online Buxfer account. It’s the company’s policy to never store this sensitive user information on its servers. It accesses the data stored on your Google Gears database on your computer, and authenticates you and your information with your financial institution. You can delete the data or make it unavailable to Buxfer whenever you want.[via TheMoneyUpdate]
Mint has received some heat from those concerned about letting a web startup store their personal data on its servers. Wesabe, like Buxfer, offers a set of financial information upload tools, so you can store your data on your own computer, then sync it with that site — we’ve found Buxfer’s implementation of this offline component to be easier to use.
Gears Case Study: What we learned from Remember The Milk
Omar Kilani of Remember The Milk took the time to write up his teams experience in Taking web applications offline with Google Gears.
The article moves past an introduction to delve into the design decisions around an offline-capable architecture, and user messaging and presentation of state. We learn why Omar decided to go with the explicit offline mode, and then the five steps to offline conversion:
- Ensuring resources are available offline
- Decoupling the application from the network
- Persisting data on the client
- Re-creating application state from persisted data
- Developing a synchronization strategy.
Omar Kilani wraps it up in his conclusion:
By now, you should be itching to add offline support to your web application (we hope!). If you should take anything away from this article, it's that taking your application offline isn't as hard or complex as it may first seem, and that Gears is a joy to work with (and it'll become even easier and more fun as the project matures and is used by more applications).Thanks to the Remember The Milk team for taking their application offline in record speed, and for taking the time to share their experience.
As for us at RTM, we couldn't be happier with Gears. The speed at which we were able to provide offline functionality (four days from reading the documentation to a launchable implementation) is a testament to the quality, ease of use, and production-readiness of Gears. Many thanks to the Google Gears engineers for their foresight and for making this an open source project to which members of the Internet community can contribute.
