Tech Center Current

Web applications have been all the buzz lately. Traditional desktop applications for e-mail, calendars, and basic word processing have begun losing favor to the online versions you can use in a web browser. Google has so far lead the pack in web application development, and they have recently released a tool which will help take web applications to the next level.

Web applications have several advantages over traditional desktop applications. The data is stored at a central remotely-accessible location, so you can access it from any computer. The application is run within a web browser, so it isn’t dependent on certain operating systems or versions. The “software” itself is typically hosted by the vendor, so security updates and other improvements can be seamlessly deployed by the vendor without any user action or user responsibility. Companies like Google have more safeguards in place to prevent data loss than most users do, in case of hardware failure, cracking attempts, etc. Web applications are usually built on top of the well-established HTML, CSS, and DOM standards which may allow for better accessibility and user control over the presentation.

But along with these benefits, there are also some shortcomings to web applications. The data isn’t in the user’s control, so it may be difficult to manually move data in or out of some web applications. Although desktop applications have equal or higher potential for violating your privacy than web applications, it’s possible for advanced users and tools to monitor and control what your desktop applications are sending across the Internet; with web applications, it’s out of your hands. Software updates are typically done at the vendor’s whim, so you often don’t have the opportunity to review or prevent certain updates. Also, web applications generally require an Internet connection in order to function; if you’re on the road and aren’t near a hotspot, you may be completely unable to access your data.

Google has released an open source browser add-on called Google Gears which will help to address that last shortcoming. Google Gears sets up a local database and API on your own computer which web applications can choose to use for offline storage and functionality.

This is similar to a proposed feature of the upcoming HTML 5 standard, due in 2010, which the developers of the Mozilla Firefox web browser plan to implement natively by the end of 2007. Unfortunately, Google Gears does not use the model proposed in the HTML 5 drafts, so there is currently an issue of two competing standards. This is unusual, since Google usually works closely with Mozilla on contributions like Firefox 2’s fraud protection and Firefox 3’s upcoming malware protection. Whether or not Firefox or any other browser will end up supporting Google Gears’ API natively (without an add-on) is up in the air, and will probably depend on how widely Google Gears gets implemented in web applications, but Mozilla Technology Strategist Mike Shaver said that Mozilla wasn’t about to simply give up on the work already done on supporting the HTML 5 model. It will be possible for a browser to support both models at the same time if the browser developers choose to implement them.

For now, the Google Gears model is the only one of the two currently available to regular users, and it is available as an add-on for the Firefox and Internet Explorer web browsers on Windows, as well as Firefox on Linux and Mac. A Safari version is planned in the future. Google Gears is currently used by Google Reader’s offline mode, and more web applications are expected to adopt it in the future.