Google Gears based offline app, boring because it “just worked”?
Monday, May 12th, 2008I’ve spent the past couple of months elbow deep in writing a Ruby on Rails based AJAX/REST/throw-in-whatever-hip-acronyms-you want-here-application. It was the same old “client” and “server” application we’ve all seen… someone enters data in a slick desktop application and then a “dumb client/mobile client” consumes it over some type of shoddy internet connection that sporadically works correctly. Where in the past we might have written the client specifically for some type of hardware and operating system, we used the web browser and Google Gears. Google Gears “just worked” and so, this is a rather boring post, unless you consider that the iPhone SDK should support the WHATWG Offline Storage recommendation and at that point our team can claim we have an offline iPhone web application. :) Go give Gears a shot, it might impress you.
p.s. if you’re working in ruby and would like some horribly written rake tasks for manipulating a Google Gears local database please leave a comment and I’ll see about making those available somewhere.