Google Gears up for offline web apps
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Steps on Microsoft's toes...again Google has poked its fingers into the offline web application pie with today's launch of browser add-on Gears.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Google Inc. is hosting events for software developers in 10 cities around the world on Thursday, promoting the use of its tools and services to build Web-based applications. The events, which began in Sydney and will wrap up later Thursday in San Jose, California, were expected to attract around 5,000 developers, with many others tuning in online. The events provide further evidence of how far Google has come from being an Internet search company to offering software and services that compete increasingly with those of Microsoft Corp. In a series of presentations, engineers showed how developers can use APIs (application programming interfaces) for Google Maps, Google Checkout and other services to add functionality to Web sites or build new, mash-up applications. The company also unveiled new software, includingÂ a browser plug-in called Google Gears, for viewing Web applications offline, and the Google Mashup Editor, an "experimental tool" for creating user interfaces with AJAX. Gregory Renard, CTO of IT consulting company Wygwam , traveled from Brussels for the event near Bastille in Paris. He came to research whether he should start using Google's APIs for his work, which involves building proof-of-concept applications for businesses and government agencies. In a sense he is on the front line of Google's rivalry with Microsoft. Renard is a Microsoft Most Valued Professional, one of a group of hand-picked developers chosen for their deep knowledge of Microsoft products. Today he is undecided as to whether he prefers the Google tools to Microsoft's competing Windows Live APIs for Web-based applications. Google's roots are on the Web but Microsoft has much more experience building tools for developers, he said. "Google is a search company that wants to be a software company, and Microsoft is a software company that wants to be a search company," Renard said. In any case, he's glad that Google has emerged as a Microsoft competitor because it should ensure more innovation and lower prices, he said. One question he hoped to get answered Thursday was whether Google's APIs will remain free to use, which is important if he plans to use them for his clients. Yvon Cognard was there to learn more about the Google Maps API, which his company uses at its Web site Trivop.com , which bills itself as "the first video guide for hotels." He has already been using it for some time and called it "a very good tool," although Google could do better with its documentation, he said. Cyril Pierre de Geyer was trying to decide if his company, Anaska , which provides training in MySQL and PHP, should also offer training in Google APIs. Anaska uses Google Maps on its own Web site to show locations of its training centers, he said. Google has a good reputation with developers and contributes code to the open-source community, such as extensions for the MySQL database, de Geyer said. But he has also noticed a tendency by Google to monetize its services more aggressively than a few years ago, he said, by putting more ads on its search results pages, for example. For Google, the events should help to build a bigger developer community, which in turn should help promote paid services such as the professional edition of its online productivity applications. It should also mean more Web sites using Google services, which helps drive its advertising business. Company engineers sought to emphasize the collaborative role that developers can play with Google's APIs. "We need your creativity and your imagination to drive the development of these products," said Patrick Chanezon, evangelist for Google Checkout, at the start of the Paris meeting . The other events Thursday were being held in Tokyo, Beijing, Moscow, Sao Paulo, Madrid, London, and Hamburg, Germany.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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(InfoWorld) - Developers haveÂ big plans for Gears, the Google Inc. browser plug-in designed to provide offline access to Web-hosted applications. Although Gears has only been available for about two weeks in anÂ early-stage version, many developers have rushed to give it a test drive and brainstorm for new ways to use it. The response to Gears reflects the rising demand for using Web-hosted applications without necessarily being connected to the Internet. Dustin Hand is looking at Gears for a Web application he is creating for an American Red Cross chapter in Tallahassee, Florida. The application must have an offline component so that it can be used even if a major disaster knocks out Internet access. The application will be used to manage the list of local Red Cross volunteers, and will contain these people's contact information along with their skills. Once completed and implemented in the Red Cross' Capital Area Chapter of Florida, the application will be pitched for adoption in Red Cross offices nationwide. "Ensuring that a Web application such as this works during a disaster regardless of the outside [Internet access] networks being down is of top priority," Hand, a Red Cross volunteer IT coordinator, said via e-mail. Gears, an open source browser extension, contains three components. The first is a local server for caching and delivering "application resources" like HTML and JavaScript without a server connection. The second piece is a database that will allow for storing and accessing data from within the browser. The final component is what Google calls "a worker thread pool," designed to boost Web applications' responsiveness by carrying out operations in the background. Before Google released Gears at the end of May, Hand was considering hosting the volunteers' database physically in the Red Cross offices for offline access. However, the chapter lacks the infrastructure to have database access on site. Its Web hosting company could house the database, but then it would be located off site and possibly unavailable in the event of a disaster. "Google Gears would allow us to use our existing infrastructure -- our off-site database -- in the event of Internet connectivity failure, allowing us to continue to provide expedited service to the victims," Hand wrote. He acknowledges that Gears still needs significant improvement for usage in production applications, something Google has also made clear. Although Gears is available to anyone as a free download, at this point it's intended mostly for developers who can give Google feedback to improve the product. Google also hopes to push Gears as an industry standard for offline access to Web-hosted applications. Another developer with high hopes for Gears is Brandon Kraft from the University Catholic Center campus ministry of the University of Texas at Austin. Kraft hopes Gears will allow him to give an offline component to a variety of Web-hosted resources available to university students and staff. Like other early testers, Kraft plans to wait for Gears to mature before using it in production applications. So far, he has run into a few kinks, including a clunky synchronization indicator. Kraft also stumbled with a known issue that has prevented proxy server users from installing Gears. After the installer failed twice on him, Kraft put Gears aside. A week later, he delved into the issue and, after 20 minutes, worked around it. "For the average consumer, once they get an error message [during the installation], they won't come back," Kraft said in a phone interview. The proxy server issue, flagged repeatedly in discussion forums, has caused some developers to take Google to task, a sign that with the high expectations also come strong feelings. Many corporate developers connect to the Internet via a proxy server. However, by the end of next week, the installer's problem with proxy server connections will be solved for most users, a Google spokesman said Friday. Google already started updating its servers with the latest version of the Gears installer, and some users have downloaded it already. "The update will be finished by next week, at which point you can be sure of getting the latest version of the installer from the Gears Web site," the spokesman said via e-mail. Despite its bugs, Gears has also generated enthusiasm among IT security experts. "I strongly believe that light footprint on the end-point device -- the user's computer -- makes for strong security. Because of that, I always prefer Web applications to installed applications," Maxime Rousseau, a security consultant with SociÃ©tÃ© Conseil Lambda Inc. in QuÃ©bec, Canada, said via e-mail. Despite liking Google's Docs & Spreadsheets Web-hosted application suite, Rousseau doesn't recommend it to clients, saying that it's not fast enough due to Web pages' lagging responses. He believes that Google will eventually address those issues, however. Although interest is high among users for Gears to support Docs & Spreadsheets, Gmail and other Google hosted applications, Gears currently only supports one Google application: the Reader RSS syndicated feed manager. "Something like Google Gears has been needed for the Web for quite a long time, and as far as I can tell, it is a nicely structured architecture," Hand, from the Red Cross, wrote. Â
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Google on Thursday provided software developers with technology to keep online applications like e-mail running on computers even if Internet connections are dropped, unavailable or unreliable.
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As part of its effort to make offline information searchable online, Google has announced that it is working with the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the University of Oxford as well as The New York Public Library to
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The net is buzzing with rumours that Google is working on a web browser. Online journals, or weblogs, have put together a series of developments which suggest that the search engine is developing new web tools.
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Google Inc. on Friday will join the crowded field of services registering Web site addresses in a move aimed at encouraging more usage of the online search leader's free software products.
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GOOGLE, with whom I spend more time than with my loved ones, is planning to put the contents of the worldâs greatest libraries on line, including the Bodleian in Oxford and those of Harvard and Stanford in America.
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New Google software brings Web-based applications offline, positioning the company in what some say is direct competition with Microsoft.
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An alliance of companies led by Google plans to roll out a common set of standards to allow developers to write programs for Googleâs Orkut and other social networking Web sites.
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Google is offering free software that lets users simultaneously search the Web and their personal computers for information. Analysts call the move a potential blow to rivals Microsoft and Yahoo in the race
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Google extends standards to the industry âWe feel very strongly about this being an industry effort and being a standard. We want this to be the one way that developers can add offline capabilities to their applications,â says Jeff Huger, Googleâs VP of engineering, during the keynote for the companyâs global Developer Day.â¦
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NEW YORK - A small software developer today plans to unveil a suite of applications - browser, camera, games and more - based on the new Google-endorsed operating system, Android.
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By releasing a Web-based subscription package called Google Apps, the search giant goes right for Bill Gatesâs gut
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The search giant Google is rumoured to be working on its own web browser.
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Google, the world&#39;s most popular search engine plans to transform the trip to the library into a trip to the nearest computer.
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Google is planning to launch a new product that will allow researchers to store open-source datasets for free, allowing anyone with an internet connection access to terabytes of scientific data.