With all the commotion around Appollo I forgot about another key player in the field: Google. Today they opened up the beta of Google Gears, a solution to run webapplications without the need of an internet connection. They achieve this by the means of a browser extension which is availlable for Firefox 1.5+ (OSX, Linux, Win) and IE 6+.
When accessing a gears enabled site the extension asks permission to store data locally:
The fun part is in the fact that you can query this database using javascript using full flexed SQL:
[javascript]
// Get the 3 most recent entries. Delete any others.
var rs = db.execute(‘select * from Demo order by Timestamp desc’);
var index = 0;
while (rs.isValidRow()) {
if (index < 3) {
recentPhrases[index] = rs.field(0);
} else {
db.execute('delete from Demo where Timestamp=?', [rs.field(1)]);
}
++index;
rs.next();
}
rs.close();
[/javascript]
(full source availlable here)
I really think this is what is needed for the next generation of web applications; I for instance would like to have a look a mail stored in my GMail account or items in my NetVibes homepage!
As soon as I got some time on my hands I’ll give it a go, can’t wait!