On 4/16/09 3:35 PM, Marco Schuster wrote:
Are there any plans to use Google Gears for storage on clients? Okay, people have to enable it by hand, but it shoulda speed up page loads for people very much (at least for those who use it).
For those not familiar with it, Google Gears provides a few distinct capabilities to client-side JavaScript code. Equivalents of these features are being standardized in HTML 5 / WHATWG work, and some of them are already available in some production browsers without installing a separate extension.
(Note that the first usage of Gears services on a site requires user interaction -- the user must click through a permission dialog -- so while you can make use of them for 'progressive enhancement' you can't do so transparently. The same isn't necessarily true of browsers implementing them natively.)
* Caching static files locally under application control ('LocalServer')
Most of the time not a huge win over simply setting decent caching headers. Main advantage is if you want to provide an offline mode for your application, you're more likely to actually have the resources you need since you can pre-fetch them and control expiration.
Note there has been some experimental work on hacking some offline viewing/editing with Gears into MediaWiki: http://wiki.yobi.be/wiki/Mediawiki_LocalServer
but a really full implementation would be hard to hack into our architecture.
* Client-side SQLite database
Local database storage can be useful for various things like local edit drafts, storage of data for offline viewing, etc.
Note that anything stored client-side is *not* automatically replicated to other browsers, so it's not always a good choice for user-specific data since people may hop between multiple computers/devices/browsers.
* Background JavaScript worker threads
Not super high-priority for our largely client-server site. Can be useful if you're doing some heavy work in JS, though, since you can have it run in background without freezing the user interface.
* Geolocation services
Also available in a standardized form in upcoming Firefox 3.5. Could be useful for geographic-based search ('show me interesting articles on places near me') and 'social'-type things like letting people know about local meetups (like the experimental 'geonotice' that's been running sometimes on the watchlist page).
-- brion