Gears (software)

Gears (formerly Google Gears ) is now no longer project developed by Google. Gears expanded supported web browsers some features that were offered by the browsers at the time or not is not in a consistent form. Approximately it is possible to synchronize content of web applications for later offline reading or store data in a local SQLite database. It is also possible, after the user allows it to determine the geographical position from a connected GPS receiver, the available wireless networks and mobile radio transmitter, or service. It also allows Gears to select and upload multiple files at once.

Google has announced the development in November 2011 set since is no longer necessary with the broad support of HTML5 Gears. Support for Gears has already been removed in version 12 .. The source code from the own browser Google Chrome is an open source project still available.

Overview

Gears is installed in the browser extension ( browser plug -in) that allows a JavaScript API to access the local disk. The extension is currently available for Firefox on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux as well as for Internet Explorer. For Safari they are only for Mac OS X.

Besides Google Reader and Google Drive Gears support since January 2009, also Gmail. Web applications from other vendors such as Remember the Milk, Zoho or WordPress ( as of version 2.6) support the Gears functionality. However, manually switch between online and offline mode is required.

Development

A Google developer developed a version of Google Reader during the company's program, which allows workers, 20 percent of the working week - to use for their own projects - which means a working day. Bret Taylor, the head of development of Google's project group, said that the engineer would have access to the Google Reader during a business trip.

On 28 May 2008 it was decided to rename Google Gears for Gears. This is to show that there is an open project that is not only run by Google. Therefore went on 11 June 2008, the new logo (without Google in the logo ) online.

Since September 2008, there is also a version of Gears for Safari on the Mac.

On 19 February 2010 will be announced in the Gears blog that Google Gears has its support scaled back in favor of the free HTML5 web standards. In particular, no new features will be added more in Gears. With the release of Google Chrome 12 on June 7, 2011 Gears has been removed from Chrome. Previously, Chrome is the only browser that Gears already mitlieferte in the default configuration.

As you can read on the product page now, the download of Gears is available until December 2011.

License

Gears was released as open source under the BSD license.

Components

  • A local server, the cache and resources for server applications offers (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc. )
  • A database ( SQLite), the data is secure offline
  • Synchronize data in the background
  • One of the two published with Gears 0.4 APIs is the GeolocationAPI. This can be the location of the user to determine. This API is a W3C Proposed Recommendation
BSD licenses Plug-in (computing)
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