Google Gears and Apollo… and Tubes?

Since reading this announcement on the Google Gears API Blog last evening, I’ve been wondering to myself (from time-to-time) how this would/could/will apply to the Apollo runtime. Apollo’s integrated web engine is WebKit which is the same engine the Safari browser runs on… but Safari is not supported by the Gears API as of yet. Though as stated on the Gears site- it will be.

It is mentioned in that same announcement that Adobe is one of the “industry partners” working with Google on this project. I can only imagine that there will be some base shared technology between Google Gears and the Apollo local database probably in the form of SQLite?

There are three features touted on the Google Gears website that are of interest:

  1. Store and serve application resources locally
  2. Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
  3. Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness

Point #1 can already be achieved through the Apollo alpha using the integrated File API and point #3, I believe, is possible as well since Apollo apps can be built with AJAX (though I have only dealt with Apollo through Flex and cannot confirm anything specific on that front). So that leaves point #2… this capability within Apollo would be amazing!


“It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes!”

1 thought on “Google Gears and Apollo… and Tubes?”

  1. Mike Chambers has clarified this in regard to Apollo:
    “…we are working on aligning the Apollo DB and Gears DB apis, with the goal of making it easier to build applications and code that can leverage both API implementations (on the desktop and in the browser).”

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