Speeding Up WordPress With Gears

7/10/2008 05:09:00 PM
Posted by Brad Neuberg, Gears Team

WordPress.com just recently went live with Gears support for accelerating the user-interface, and the upcoming WordPress 2.6 release will also bundle Gears.

Andrew Ozz, a member of the WordPress team and the person responsible for the Gears integration wrote the following guest post on his experience working with Gears:

I thoroughly enjoyed working with Gears. After checking the excellent API documentation and examples, the test implementation of a ManagedResourceStore in WordPress was ready to go in about an hour.

After that I only had to refine the various status messages and user prompts and the first step of implementing Gears support in WordPress was ready for public testing. That was the fastest and easiest integration with another open source software I've had the opportunity to contribute to.

Currently WordPress implements Gears support in a somewhat "non-traditional" way. It uses only the local storage to cache all static files from the admin interface on the user's computer, eliminating needless requests to the server and improving page load speed, quite significantly in some cases.

Some of the limitations of this are that Gears prompts for permission on each sub-domain, so when a user has several blogs on WordPress.com, it will have to be enabled for each separately. Another is that although all files are served from the local storage in SSL mode, the browser reports that the web page is partially encrypted.

The Gears support is already live on WordPress.com, and is included in the next version of the self-hosted WordPress, that is due in a few days.

In my opinion Gears is more than an easy way to enable online applications to work offline. It extends the web browser into an OS independent application development platform. I won't be surprised to see some very different web enabled desktop applications built with it.

Gears Case Study: What we learned from Remember The Milk

9/04/2007 11:56:00 AM
Posted by Dion Almaer, Gears team

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:

1. Ensuring resources are available offline
2. Decoupling the application from the network
3. Persisting data on the client
4. Re-creating application state from persisted data
5. Developing a synchronization strategy.

Finally, we learn some tips and caveats from the RTM Gears implementation, including dealing with the LocalServer, the different types of offline, defensive coding, debugging, and coding with upgrades in mind.

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).

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.

Thanks to the Remember The Milk team for taking their application offline in record speed, and for taking the time to share their experience.