I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Stephen from the SMH just gave me a heads up on Google Gears, an open source browser add-in that enables offline applications.
Gears puts Google in the driver’s seat
To start the ball rolling, Google has “Gears-enabled” its RSS feed reader, Google Reader.
This is a significant move from Google into the Browser. Very, very clever! The timing is significant, being well before Firefox 3.
The tech world will be all over this over the next few weeks to see how elegant the implementation is.
This is a very significant shot by Google. First out can create a standard. This is a race. You can imagine the scramble going on inside Microsoft today.
What do you think?
blog
Rod,
Interesting timing! I just spent the past little bit playing with the Buzzword Word Processor:
http://www.virtub.com/screenshots/
I believe it’s flex-based. Old-Guard companies should be very, very nervous about all this change. Three Losers that come to mind:
Microsoft (as you state) for obvious reasons. If they aren’t innovating (and the table thing looks very cool) then they’re playing catch up.
Apple. Boy did they drop the ball on .Mac. His Jobsness ought to fire whoever is in charge of that dog and refund everybody’s money. And WebObjects is dead. Take W.O. out back, give it the old yeller treatment, and buy Joyent. Oh, and they need to do a boatload of PR damage control with the InfoSec crowd or risk losing the sneezers.
Sun. None of this stuff is Java, Solaris or Sparc. If you haven’t bought Joyent yet, do it before someone smarter than you does (above), but leave them autonomous.
On the fence:
Adobe. Flex is their big hope. It could be awesome, or it could be the more of what everyone hates about Java and Flash. They have no online presence to speak of at a time when there are at least two start ups creating online versions of every creative suite application.
Red Hat. How’s JBoss working out? Seriously, they’re lucky Novell’s going to screw up SuSE so bad that it’ll make their treatment of Unixware look successful. I just hope they are very smart with REL.
Buy low:
Thoughtworks. Their Rubyworks initiative is brilliant. They may just pull off a brilliant services combined with products play (but it will be tough).
Joyent. Connector turned out to be to far ahead of its time, but the lessons learned there, at textdrive and with Accelerator make their IP the stuff to own for the next 5 years.
Just posted some screen shots of the setup of Gears into Google Reader - http://www.talios.com/google_reader_goes_offline_with_gears.htm
Havn’t gone offline yet to try it out but here goes….
I’d agree with most of DHH’s comments:
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/347-youre-not-on-a-fucking-plane-and-if-you-are-it-doesnt-matter
It seems like all buzz and very little actual gain to the user in reality.
- JD
I tend to agree with JD, given Winforms or Windows Presentation Foundation etc Javascript + HTML still makes a poor desktop development environment for a large range of products due to platform limitations or development pain. Applications designed this way usually don’t have a natural fit with the OS and hardly integrate into explorer context sensitive menus etc.
However I can see how in niche environments, it can be harnessed to make a fairly compelling use case. It is one such use case which has lead me to start a port of Google Gears to Windows CE and Windows Mobile powered PDAs (see http://code.google.com/p/google-gears-ce/).
Although most PDAs have cellular or wifi connectivity now days, it is not always cheap or available (especially while roaming overseas). Having worked on teams developing large scale enterprise PDA applications in the past, cellular coverage and application deployment/upgrading have been continual pain points.
Assuming your application can fit within the Javascript + HTML “sandbox” (which not all will), something like Google Gears (or other similiar frameworks) neatly resolve many of these problems.
Have a look at http://www.christec.co.nz/blog/ for more details on my progress on this project if you are interested.