Google Gears

Google announced an early beta of Gears, a "browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs:

• Store and serve application resources locally
• Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
• Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness"

Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. Gears provides three key features:

• A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server
• A database, to store and access data from within the browser
• A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background

Google Gears is currently an early-access developers' release. It is not yet intended for use by real users in production applications at this time.

Google Gears extends browsers by making new APIs available to JavaScript code. Like all APIs, they must be used explicitly. To take advantage of the offline features provided by Google Gears, you'll need to add or change code in your web application.

Only web sites that have been specifically designed to use Google Gears can take advantage of its offline capabilities.