My 2 cents to this: - The Google SQLite database is Browser, Profile and Domain local. So the path depends on everything. Change the domain? Patch changes. Change the browser? Path changes. Change the profile (another login or another browser's profile)? Path changes as well. This is because of security and interlocking issues (Gears locks the database excusively as long as the browser accesses it, so two browsers cannot access the datbase concurrently even if you make it accessible to more than one browser somehow. Also different Gears implementation might change the way the database looks.)
- If you want to create some cross platform web application with SQL access which is able to survive the future, you cannot use Gears nor HTML5. Gears because it will go out of business when HTML5 arrives, and HTML5 likewise not because it is not there today and it is doubtful, that the Web SQL Database http://dev.w3.org/html5/webdatabase/ will become a standard supported on all platforms. (The HTML5 Web SQL Database API is not yet a standard at all, it's not even a recommendation, it's just a working paper with some doubtful ideas in it. My opinion.) So if you just want to write some Gears application which uses SQL for something or another, go ahead. But don't complain that a certain feature is not supported in a timely manner by Google, please. As you have been warned in advance. Gears is no solution. It's just a hack for Google to be able to support something new (like offline Gmail) before the standard has arrived in a stable manner which is widely enough deployed such that it has become usable. To make it somewhat portable there really is no other good way to have something like a locally running data container (probably some Java application server listening on port 8080) which then is accessed via the browser. If done properly with cross domain workers of Gears this can be accessed from a website, too, such that you can do syncs (but this is nothing new, JavaScript and IMG-GETs can emulate such a communication as well) with the help of the browser (such that the app does not need to go online itself). However this still fails on todays smartphones due to the lack of interest of the current OS vendors to allow owners of that phones to take full control of the complete power of such phones (which have more CPU, RAM, Storage, Graphics power and Internet connectivity than an average 20000$ Unix workstation in 1990), so you cannot run such a portable application on smartphones as well if the vendor (like Apple) denies this application in their mobile store front. And on such smartphones you will be left with a certain subset of Gears as well if Gears is supported at all. I never tried it, but I think, that the Database API will not be supported on such phones. Don't get me wrong. I like Gears, I use it. And it is good that it is there. But don't think Gears is something you can base your business on. If you do so, you err. Gears is an gadget, an option, something which is a nice to have, which you can use if you like, but still it must run without, as it is likely that you somewhere must stay without Gears. Like with FF3.6, no Gears for months. -Tino To unsubscribe from this group, send email to gears-users+unsubscribegooglegroups.com or reply to this email with the words "REMOVE ME" as the subject.
