While a lot of the news was focused on Microsoft’s boffo Surface Computing system released yesterday, Google released their own way cool tool set and API’s for Google Gears. Google Gears is:

Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. Gears provides three key features: A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server. A database, to store and access data from within the browser
A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background. Google Gears is currently an early-access developers’ release. It is not yet intended for use by real users in production applications at this time. Source: Google

In going through the site and demo code, this looks like a JSON model system that is simple with under a dozen individual classes that can be addressed. It looks like a lot of the material that is used is pulled and then stored in a local database system using the database and resultset classes.

The database is an SQL database rather than a flat file system so there will be the ability to tie this into just about any database system you can think of from MySQL through MS-SQL or Oracle.

In general the factory class is what is used to instantiate all the other classes in the set, with worker pools, local server and then storage via the database.

While not ready yet for public consumption and the demo code is a typical hello world set. It will be very interesting to see what the folks come up with to show off the code. Hopefully it is something more interesting that the “eBay examples” that keep on cropping up in places.