Google launches Gears - Announcement made at Sydney Developer Day

We have over 400 developers here today at the Australian Google Developer day, and we have just heard from Alan Noble, Engineering Director of Google Australia.

Alan told us that Google Australia aims to support Australian businesses, Australian users and the Australian development community. With this many attendees, we know we have a big responsibility.

Google APIs arguably became popular due to the Google Maps API, which was based on work done right here in Sydney by Lars Rasmussen and his team, who created the original Google Maps application. So it is fitting that we are the first ones to hear about two new additions to the Google applications toolchain: Mapplets and Google Gears.

We will hear more about Mapplets later on in the day (but check out http://www.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/mapplets/index.html if you want to get ahead of the game), but Alan gave us a quick introduction to Google Gears – a browser extension for Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer which allows AJAX web applications to run offline.

Following Alan’s keynote, we saw an in-depth introduction to Google Gears from Aaron Boodman, one of the Gears developers. The audience applauded as Aaron demonstrated Gears by running his talk as a database-driven AJAX application, then unplugging his network cable halfway through and continuing his talk seamlessly, even running database queries against his captured database to prove that it wasn’t all done with smoke and mirrors. (Aaron’s talk will be made available as a YouTube video shortly)

We are releasing Google Gears as an open-source beta to allow the development community to have early input into this technology, and to ensure that it remains free for everyone to use. We hope that it will become the first step in creating an open standard for offline access

If you’re interested in developing with Google Gears, you can check out the Gears API here: http://code.google.com/apis/gears/. And everyone can start using Gears with Google Reader (link) – just follow the prompts from inside Reader.

As Google Gears is still a beta launch, there will be many changes being made and new Gears-enabled applications coming out in the weeks and months to come, so keep your eye out for more updates!