Adobe Gears Toward Google Gears

One of the major features of upcoming Adobe Apollo is support disconnected Web applications

Jun. 2, 2007 04:00 PM

Something new is cooking in the Google's software pot. It’s called Google Gears, which is a new way to create offline Web applications.

“Google Gears (BETA) is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs: store and serve application resources locally, store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database, run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness”.

They made this announcement during Google Developers Day in Sydney, Australia.

One of the major features of upcoming Adobe Apollo is support disconnected Web applications, and Adobe’s Kevin Lynch announced that Google Gears will be available in Apollo. Adobe Flex applications already use the space on the client’s disk for storing instances of any objects (this is called local SharedObjects), and turning this disk space into a fully searchable RDBMS sounds pretty exciting to me. While some people sitting on fast Internet connection lines may not see benefits of working offline, most of the world population is still using slow lines. And even if you have fast connection, having some data on your local disk may help if you work with enterprise applications that move megabytes of data over the wire.

Last year Sun Microsystems have included a client database Java DB in Java 6, which would be more useful if Java offered a competitive Web client VM. This situation won’t change for at least a year (we are expecting a small footprint Consumer JRE next year). It's been a year since Java 6 has been released, has anyone heard of applications that use Java DB? At least I did not.

I wonder why Sun and Adobe do not collaborate? Sun is moving aside with new JavaFX toy, but it’s a little too late. May be they should work on a Java-to-ActionScript compiler that can be converted to bytecode for Flash Player? I'm sure David Temkin from Laszlo Systems will be happy to help with this.

No wonder that Google is where it is, and what Sun has on the desktop? As a noted writer Isaac Babel wrote many years ago, Java on the desktop has “spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart”.

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About Yakov Fain
Yakov Fain is a Managing Director of Farata Systems, consulting, training and product company. He has authored several Java books, dozens of technical articles. SYS-CON Books released his latest co-authored book , Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java: Secrets of the Masters in Spring 2007. Sun Microsystems has nominated and awarded Yakov with the title Java Champion. He leads the Princeton Java Users Group. He is an Adobe Certified Flex Instructor. Yakov co-athored the O'Reilly book "Enterprise Application Development with Flex". He twits at twitter.com/yfain.

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Adobe Gears Toward Google Gears

Francois Orsini wrote: Well, Java 6 has only been made GA back in December 2006. Java DB is based on Apache Derby which is bundled and used in a wide variety of appplications (app servers, client, standalone db server, etc)...Zimbra is using it on the client as part of their Zimbra Desktop solution... http://wiki.apache.org/db-derby/UsesOfDerby and of course it is hard to track where it's being used as there is quite a bit of JDK 6 downloads everday eh ;-) and we may not find out until an application is read that Java DB or Derby has been used...Java DB alone is bundled in GlassFish app server... I hear of new ones almost everyday...