Gears on Mobile

This is a very intersting concept Google is pushing. We felt like it is contradicting with messages by other speakers. Google Gear runs on the client side and enhances the browser capability. Think of this as a Flash plugin. With Flash plugin (please note that it is ubiquitous close of 98% on all user machines), Flash applications behave like Rich applications running on the client side. We could make this application run in offline mode if we want to. Google Gears is on the same lines. It makes the application run in offline mode and also real-time where it constantly interacts with the server and synchronizes the data on the client side. Obviously, this interaction is transparant to the end user.



What Gears do on the mobile device is, they allow us to create a native application that takes advantage of the features available on the device. Also a light weight database (SQLite) helps to store the data on the device.



The statistics say that very few people develop on the mobile browsers. Partly because of the fragmented brower market on the mobiles. In addition, mobile web apps are slow, unresponsive and blind. This actually motivated to develop Gears on Mobile devices.



Gears offer APIs like Data API, Server API, Desktop API and Storage API. There are two types of caches - Resource Cache and ManagedResourceCache. These cache mechanisms allow apps to cache majority of the data so there are less interactions over the network. This kinda makes sense...but what about the security?