Digital Earth Weblog

At Google Developer Day 2007 in Sydney, Google have announced the early beta of Google Gears. Gears provides seamless offline storage for your browser-based applications. It’s an open source plug-in for browsers, available under a New BSD license.

Quick takeaways:

• Uses SQLite for offline storage of millions of documents, and includes full text search.
• Sits between your web app and the server and manages synchronisation.
• Provides process worker for offloading JavaScript processing to worker threads.

This looks really interesting for data intensive mapping applications, although it’s not clear if you can use the database to store image tiles.