Trip Report: Gears and the Future of Web Apps

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

I had the pleasure to head to my home town (London, England) to participate in the Future of Web Apps conference that brought together an interesting set of developers who want to take a glimpse at the future.... and the present.

I gave a presentation at the conference on Google Gears that covered all of the core components (Database, LocalServer, WorkerPool) and also showed off some of the great work that the community has been working on (libraries that work on top of the APIs, great examples, etc).

I really enjoyed the many questions that I got at the end of the talk, and through out the conference. Being in Europe, it was very interesting to see many questions on mobile Gears. The questions came in from app developers, mobile phone vendors, and phone networks alike. It seems that it is a common wish to have the offline abilities on their phones. I quickly realized why this was the case from the Londoners.... the tube! They need to put network repeaters in the tube, but since they have found it impossible to get air conditioning down there, I doubt that will happen any time soon!

I also got to talk to developers about architecture practices around the applications that they are taking offline. As always, it was interesting to talk to developers working with this in the real world.

The Gears project is run very much in the open, so take a peak at the Google Group for Gears and join the fun.

Here are the slides from my presentation: