Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Gears, an open source technology allowing browsers to support offline web applications has been released by Google to coincide with the company's annual Developer Day.
Web applications are fine when you've got an Internet connection, but what happens when someone cuts through the cable or you want to work during a flight and Wi-Fi isn't available? Or, for that matter, when you're trying to get something done at an overloaded hotspot?
That's where offline web apps come into their own.
Gears provides three main JavaScript APIs. LocalServer stores and accesses application pages offline, Database stores and accesses application data on the user's computer, andWorkerPool performs long-running tasks such as synchronising data between the user's computer and the server.
There's nothing magical about Gears - web applications must be rewritten to take advantage of its facilities. A Gears-enabled version of Google Reader has been released to demonstrate what's possible.
"With Google Gears we're tackling a key limitation of the browser in order to make it a stronger platform for deploying all types of applications and enabling a better user experience in the cloud," said Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer of Google. "We believe strongly in the power of the community to stretch this new technology to the limits of what's possible and ultimately emerge with an open standard that benefits everyone."
Support for the project has been voiced by Adobe, Mozilla and Opera.
"This announcement is a significant step forward for web applications," said Brendan Eich, CTO at Mozilla Corporation. "We're pleased to see Google working with open source and open standards bodies on offline web applications." Mozilla's Firefox project planned to include support for offline apps, and hopefully Gears will accelerate development and provide the broadest compatibility.
"The Gears API will also be available in Apollo, which enables web applications to run on the desktop, providing developers with consistent offline and local database solutions," said Kevin Lynch, senior vice president and chief software architect at Adobe.
The Google Gears beta is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, and requires Firefox 1.5 or later, or Internet Explorer 6 or 7. Safari will be supported in a later release.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
LATEST HEADLINES FROM YOUR IT
