Google Gears makes me wonder
Today I read a lot about the new “Google Gears” project. And it makes me wonder what google is doing here. Google Gears is a mix of a runtime-environment and an API to develop applications that run online as well as offline.
At a first impression it reminds me for old battles like with “Lotus Notes” where one could synchronize online and offline data. Simple for EMails but horrible for i.e. documents and complicated database content.
So why is google joining this business? My only explanation is, that they want to support their online application market (like their google-docs and picassa) by adding strong offline and synchronization capabilities. Making web applications run offline in a browser is one more step away from a single-user desktop PC - and from the OS needed here.
With their runtime-environment, google adds like an apache, and a mySQL Server to your PC. To synchronize the data on your local PC with your host system, google suggest a online synchronization via ajax technics (see here).
I will examine this in detail later because it is interesting. But for this time, I can not see how google will handle the more complicated problems of synchronization (like missed merges, concurrency problems, huge amounts of data …).
