Google Gears

Wednesday, May 30, 2007 by Dave Winer.

I read that Google is going to announce a toolkit today that lets you run web apps on a disconnected machine. Something we had working in Radio in 2001. The key is something called a desktop web server. Nothing revolutionary about it. A database and CMS that runs on the local machine. I suspect that their approach will be heavier on the database and lighter on the CMS, since they like Ajax apps (as do many others, of course), where the content rendering happens in the browser, in Javascript.