Zoho Writer Offline: Full read-write implementation released

12/04/2007 10:26:00 AM
By Dion Almaer, Google Gears Team

Back in August we discussed the first release of Zoho Writer that allowed you to work offline with Gears.

At that time we talked to Raju Vegesna and Sridhar Vembu of the Zoho team to discuss what they had released, and the architecture behind it. Zoho has taken a very pragmatic approach, in that they add a small piece, release it, and then continue to add more. This meant that the first offline release allowed you to read your documents, but not edit them.

This brings you to today, where Zoho has announced a new version of Zoho Writer which does give you the ability to edit files on a plane.

If you know that you are leaving the land of the 'net, go ahead and click on the Go Offline button, and your most recent documents will be loaded into a local database in the browser. You can then edit those files at will, and when you find a connection again you can sync up. Zoho has a merge system in the backend which detects changes made, perhaps by multiple people on the same file, and allows you to get all of the changes in.

We sat down with Raju and Sridhar again and discussed the merging and sync system, as well as the other architecture decisions that the team made with this latest release. We chat about what you can expect now, and also the next steps for offline in Writer and their other products.

Thanks once again to the Zoho team. It is great to see you moving through your applications, taking them offline with Gears!

Google Gears 0.2 developer release ready for download

8/29/2007 04:55:00 PM
Posted by Chris Prince, Gears Team

We are happy to announce the 0.2 release of Google Gears!

You can download it here. The new features are listed below.

This is a developer release. Before we update end-user machines,
we want to get API feedback from you, the developer community.

New Features

• Cross-origin API support
• WorkerPool improvements: Automatically report errors in workers, createWorkerFromUrl()
• New Gears modules:
  
  • HttpRequest
  • Timer
  • Both of these can be used in workers.

Please try out the new APIs and let us know if anything is confusing, hard-to-use, or broken. Now is the time to speak up -- after we release to end users, it becomes much harder to modify the APIs.

Dion Almaer conducted a short video interview to get more context behind the 0.2 feature set:

Gearing up with Zoho Offline

8/23/2007 02:06:00 PM
Posted by Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

We were excited to hear that Zoho added Offline Support & Comments in Zoho Writer using Google Gears.

We met with Raju Vegesna and Sridhar Vembu, of the Zoho team, to talk about the announcement and ended up with the video chat that you see below which covers:

• The current implementation and interaction model in Zoho Writer Offline
• The architecture decisions around syncing, and read/write operations
• How they chose Google Gears
• How they are going to contribute to the project (They have some interesting functionality that may make sense to be in the core).

Thanks to the Zoho team, and we look forward to seeing what you come up with next!