The story of the mystical Gears

I was asked the other day to explain what is Google Gears (now only Gears) and why is it good anyway. So let’s see why Gears has been developed, what are its strenghts and in general what it is.

What is Google Gears

Gear is a software developed by Google and released under BSD license. It is open source and it seems Google hopes that it will be widely used by web developers. It was first released by some Google developers basically just because they got mad on how incredibly slow the modern web applications are, back in May 2007, and since then it arrived to its 0.4 version (which is included by default in Google Chrome by the way). It is supported by all the modern browsers, but the web applications also have to support it. This restricted a lot its use on non-Google websites.

What is Gears and what are its strenghts

Gears basically is a server, but on the end-user’s end. It can speed up the navigation of the complicated web-applications greatly by storing data on the user’s end and running client-side scripts asynchronously in the background and by serving some cached data from the local databases and caches, thus eliminating the data transfer between the application server and the end-user.

You can learn more about Gears on the official Gears Blog and on the official Gears Home