On 4/16/09 3:35 PM, Marco Schuster wrote:
> Are there any plans to use Google Gears for storage on clients? Okay, people
> have to enable it by hand, but it shoulda speed up page loads for people
> very much (at least for those who use it).
For those not familiar with it, Google Gears provides a few distinct
capabilities to client-side JavaScript code. Equivalents of these
features are being standardized in HTML 5 / WHATWG work, and some of
them are already available in some production browsers without
installing a separate extension.
(Note that the first usage of Gears services on a site requires user
interaction -- the user must click through a permission dialog -- so
while you can make use of them for 'progressive enhancement' you can't
do so transparently. The same isn't necessarily true of browsers
implementing them natively.)
* Caching static files locally under application control ('LocalServer')
Most of the time not a huge win over simply setting decent caching
headers. Main advantage is if you want to provide an offline mode for
your application, you're more likely to actually have the resources you
need since you can pre-fetch them and control expiration.
Note there has been some experimental work on hacking some offline
viewing/editing with Gears into MediaWiki:
http://wiki.yobi.be/wiki/Mediawiki_LocalServer
but a really full implementation would be hard to hack into our
architecture.
* Client-side SQLite database
Local database storage can be useful for various things like local edit
drafts, storage of data for offline viewing, etc.
Note that anything stored client-side is *not* automatically replicated
to other browsers, so it's not always a good choice for user-specific
data since people may hop between multiple computers/devices/browsers.
* Background JavaScript worker threads
Not super high-priority for our largely client-server site. Can be
useful if you're doing some heavy work in JS, though, since you can have
it run in background without freezing the user interface.
* Geolocation services
Also available in a standardized form in upcoming Firefox 3.5. Could be
useful for geographic-based search ('show me interesting articles on
places near me') and 'social'-type things like letting people know about
local meetups (like the experimental 'geonotice' that's been running
sometimes on the watchlist page).
-- brion
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