Google Gears brings Web 2.0 to offline

Google released an open source toolkit for offline web apps – Google Gears:

It provides 3 significant components to the browser ecosystem. A multithreaded javascript environment, which provides a restricted background taks JavaScript environment for accessing remote data source without blocking the main UI. Adding support for local data storage is a new set of javascript APIs. The storage support transactional data based on SQLite. The last part is local application caching wich hosts data locally and pulls down updated data

The fist web application which starts to use Google Gears is Google Reader. I setup that feature today morning. It works perfect! Waiting for Gmail and Google Docs.

The new technology store online data to be available in offline mode will be very useful for travel web workers and people who have slow internet connection (yes, unfortunately 56K is reality in many places in the world).

[via O’Reilly Radar]