Sunday, June 10, 2007

Google Gears

Google gears enables web applications to provide offline functionality. It is now in Beta and the early release happpened in last week of may.

The first application to be gears enabled is Google reader. You can download 2000 posts and go offline and work with reader in offline mode (read posts /star items) and when you come back online, it synchronizes the changes back.
Oh Sam I Am, can I read it on the tram?

It is an interesting thing. Once gmail application enables the offline functionality, all my mail will be downloaded and i can still search and check my mails in gmail even when i am offline. There will be many more apps which will provide the functionality and it will be cool.

Check out the gears session in google developer days
GD Day London: Building better AJAX aps with Google Gears

So i thought i will get a feel for it. I downloaded the installer on windows and tried to install on my office machine. I started the installer but it erred with code - 0x80040800. It basically means that it could not connect to google site to download the gears setup. Seems like the GoogleUpdater has some issues with downloading gears - working behind corporate proxy servers. I got my proxy settings right for WinHttp api which is used by GoogleUpdater and even then it continued to fail. Finally i tried to install it on my laptop where it went fine and i got hold of the download link for the Google gears setup.

If you also face the same problem while setting it up, download the gears setup file directly instead of using GoogleUpdater to download the gears setup and install it.

On linux you just get an xpi and install the extension in firefox and you are ready to go.

I will read more on gears api and play with it.

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