I’m at Google’s Developer Day in San Jose. Looks like it’s going to be a great event – just finished the key note which concluded with an appearence by Sergey.
Google are announcing a number of things today (well they’ve announced them already because we’re the last timezone to hold a Dev Day). They, in order of most interesting IMHO, are:
- Google Gears – local storage ajax proxy for offline use
- Google Mashup Editor – looks like Yahoo Pipes, MS PopFly rival play
- Google Mapllets – Widgets that you pull into Google maps that display multiple data sets on GMaps
Google Gears looks particularly exciting because it’s essentially a local storage system that picks up the slack to provide data to your AJAX apps when your computer is offline. Gets plus points for being open source (BSD License) and for having simple javascript API.
I was already to start thinking how it matches up against Adobe Apollo, but then Adobe came out and said they were working with Google to implement this functionality in Apollo too. That’s really significant because the only other player who I was aware doing something in this area was Mozilla – and it turns out they’re not dialed into this too (Google funds a significant part of Firefox’s development).
If you build AJAX apps you need to grok Google Gears. My only fear is what Google do with the data (if anything)… but it’s an open source app so the code is there for inspection. More here.
Will report more.