The blogosphere is buzzing about Google Gears today because it’s a huge leap forward for browser applications. The fact that Google is open sourcing an offline solution that includes SQLite has gotten the attention of a lot of people. The fact that they have it working right now with Google Reader is even more significant. But one of the cool things about the response to the announcement is how the news of Adobe being involved added some weight to Gears.
Marc Orchant said it best “The reason I think this isn’t just crazy Web 2.0 hype is that Adobe has announced they are aligning their Apollo efforts with the approach Google’s taken with Gears as there are significant similarities in how the two companies have have approached their online/offline application solutions.”
As an Adobe employee, I am genuinely excited about what this means. The talk is all about how big this is going to be for the browser, and part of that comes from just having Google involved. But I think it also vindicates a lot of what we’re doing with Apollo. The browser and the desktop are getting closer, but they still provide very different experiences. The collaboration hopefully means that the Google vision for software development and the Adobe vision will match up more closely over time.
On the Adobe side, there are a few key announcements that should be highlighted and were mentioned in the keynote this morning by Kevin Lynch:
- Apollo will have an embedded database – The Apollo team has been working on adding SQLite to Apollo for a while and today it’s official that we’re going to be including it.
- Gears opens the doors for offline Flash applications – Flash is a great way to deliver applications in the browser. The fact that Adobe and Google are talking and the fact that Gears is an open source project means that adding offline support to your Flash application is a possibility.
- Gears and Apollo should have consistent APIs – Google and Adobe are working together with the aim of making the APIs for accessing the SQLite database similar for developers. The vision is that any Gears applications could be ported to Apollo (and vice versa) using roughly the same data structure that they use in Gears. The parallels will be great for developers. (More on all this from Mike Chambers)
I think people realize how important offline access is for web applications which is one of many reasons this is getting so much press. The fact that Google and Adobe are partnering to enhance applications in the browser and on the desktop is a good thing for Rich Internet Applications. It’s a very exciting time to be an RIA developer.
[tags]Google Gears, Flash, Adobe, Apollo[/tags]
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