Gmail Goes Offline

You might have heard by now that gmail has gone offline. This means that you can fire up your browser and use gmail even when you do not have an active internet connection at that time. When your laptop next gets connected to the net your emails are sent, new emails are downloaded and all changes synchronized. This is the newest web application to move online, others such as google reader and zoho writer have done it before. It seems likely that most of the desktop applications we are used to (word processing, spreadsheets, calendars, email, business logic, even 3D games) will be replaced by web applications in the coming years. In the future, all applications will be web applications.

The way gmail creates an offline (local) database is with the use of the google gears plugin. This is a plugin that provides you a JavaScript API for storing and retrieving data in the local machine. It also implements workerthreads which allow one to have multiple JavaScript threads running in the same window, thereby further improving responsiveness of your application. We will be learning all about gears later in class.