Nov 27

Written by: James Burke
27 November 2007

Zoho is an innovative company that has a diverse portfolio of web based applications including word processing, spreadsheets, database, notes, CRM and many more.

Google Gears is an Open Source browser extension that allows web based applications to transfer online data to a local database that can be queried and written to whilst not connected to the Internet (offline).

Gears provides 3 main features:

• A local server that is used to cache and serve "web" applications
• A database to store and access data via a browser
• A "worker thread" pool that enable web applications to be more responsive by carrying out activities in the background

Gears requires a small (approx 500k) download before "Gears enabled" applications can be used.

Google Reader (an RSS reader) was one of the first Gears enable application that was reportedly borne out of a need by a Google engineer to have a means of reading RSS feeds whilst on the bus journey home where WiFi connectivity was unreliable.

Gears presents many challenges to the developer implementing the technology into their applications with data synchronisation (how and when) being the main one.

Zoho Writer has implemented this by a manual choice to "Go Offline" where the decision is transferred to the user which can be useful in scenarios such as travelling where no connectivity is consistently available; staying in a rural area with no access etc. The Zoho Writer implementation automatically synchronises the last 15 updated documents.

It's early days for Google Gears but the benefits of blurring the availability of data storage to enable continual uninterupted access has to be a good move.

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