Somehow I missed the memo stating that Gears is a browser plugin, so my first concern when I learned about the project's nature was how on earth are they going to solve the deployment problem? This brought back memories of the dotcom era when I used to work at a startup that relied on a 3D visualization plugin (it was VET from Viewpoint/MetaStream in case you are wondering), at that time Flash had already reached critical mass and was being bundled with the then constant warring browsers (Netscape vs IE). Everything worked fine except the last step, consumers had to agree to install a plugin on their browsers. That little inconvenience pretty much killed all previous efforts to monetize the product in the long run. But these days Google, MySpace, Facebook and other popular sites may change that, by cleverly providing a "Make this faster" option on their sites they may help in deploying the Gears plugin. I do not harbor the thought of Gears being bundled on a future release of IE, after all Microsoft is not in good friendship with Google (its CEO may throw a chair at you if you mention the G word
).Being a browser plugin means that Gears works on the native platform, it may access your file system given a set of permissions, may create databases (using SQLLite) and even fire up a local server to allow offline operation of the same webapp. Brad mentioned there is some integration of Gears with Dojo offline toolkit and GWT. A one hour presentation is not nearly enough time to talk about all of Gears' features, specially if the audience is engaged and keeps asking questions (which means Brad's talk awakened the curiosity of many) but in all fairness it looks like Gears has a lot of potential for those that would like to code an application once for two different "deployment" profiles: web and desktop. One thing is for sure, I'll check back on Gears and possible look on how to integrate it with Grails
Some useful links
