Agile Ajax

Why Google Gears would have been a godsend 10 years ago, and still is today

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, June 14, 2007 @ 5:31 am

Toni at Keyboardsamurais has a dim view of Google Gears:

Wasn’t Ajax meant to do some significant computing on the server side? Wasn’t the whole promise of Ajax, that you’d get some meaningful data from a remote server in a quick, painless way?

Right. What Gears accomplishes is nothing like that (how could they, it’s technically impossible). Of course, you would be able to edit your spreadsheets and word processors but these have been around for offline use since the advent of personal computing. In other words: Google Gears will make it easier for developers that feel comfortable in that niche that is Ajax desktop computing.

Although dismissive in tone, this observation -- that it makes Ajax desktop computing easier -- is right on the mark. If you look at all of the projects coming out now to enable web or weblike applications on the desktop, it gets you thinking that the big boys are placing bets on the future direction of application development. Consider the contenders:

  • Adobe Apollo - Flash, HTML, JavaScript/ActionScript, PDF. With this runtime you can bring web-style development to the desktop.
  • Project Flair - The mysterious project from Sun that is supposed to free us from "junky" HTML, CSS, Javascript.
  • JavaFX - sort of like a Java/Flash highbrid.
  • Google Gears - a browser plugin that provides Javascript API's to support offline operation of webapps.

What all of these platforms have in common (and I'm sure there are more on the way), is that they enable one to develop web and desktop applications at the same time. Let me repeat: you don't have to make a choice between writing a webapp or a desktop app; you can write both of them at once. Or at least that's the idea.

Now they each handle the webtop/desktop issue in different ways. Google Gears seems to be the most fully baked and the easiest -- you don't have to completely rewrite existing apps but can start to fold in some online/offline capabilities right away. In the short term, Gears may turn out to be the winner. In the long term, we have to track what gets folded into future browser versions.

My complaint with bringing webapp techniques to the desktop is more basic. If we were designing this from scratch, is this how we would do it, with "junky" HTML, CSS and Javascript? No. Probably not. It reminds me of those people who set their clocks 30 minutes ahead so that they'll be on time. Better to just be on time. Better to design something from scratch rather than use what was essentially an overgrown system for publishing hypertext.

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Comments: 3 so far

  1. Would you not include Morfik in your list of “you don’t have to make a choice between writing a webapp or a desktop app”? Morfik is of course not among the big boys, but can handle many, if not all the features you have attributed to them including offline operations of webapps, given the operational examples of Gmail and salesforce.com in their Labs

    Comment by Fuad Ta'eed, Thursday, June 14, 2007 @ 8:03 pm

  2. Well talking about big boys, you should have a look at this where Google gears and Adobe(AIR)is compared with Dekoh and the full comparison between AIR and Dekoh has been there on Read/Write(http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/dekoh_challenges_apollo.php) for ages now.

    Comment by beyondwww, Friday, June 15, 2007 @ 12:22 am

  3. Don’t forget this one!

    http://www.joyent.com/developers/slingshot/

    Raj.

    Comment by Rajesh Duggal, Saturday, June 16, 2007 @ 10:15 am

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