Comments on: Who Cares about Desktop Access in RIAs – Adobe Engage 2008

By: » Adobeâ€™s RIA platform brings web and desktop together NeW Adobe: wow Adobe

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 07:06:31 +0000

[...] Coverage: PeopleOverProcess WebWare Ajaxian [...]

By: Brad Neuberg

Brad Neuberg — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:38:25 +0000

Hi there; I'm with the Google Gears team. I like to see Google Gears as an open source browser plugin that teaches contemporary browsers new tricks, such as offline, better performance, dropping shortcuts on the desktop, etc. Rather than introduce a new programming model its about augmenting the browser and the browser's existing model with more tools, in an open and cross-browser way, so that we can keep evolving the web and solving problems.

Best,

Brad Neuberg

By: The Universal Desktop mobile edition

The Universal Desktop mobile edition — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:13:16 +0000

[...] Coverage: PeopleOverProcess WebWare Ajaxian [...]

By: Berkay

Berkay — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 14:52:40 +0000

John, I didn't mean to suggest that gears is not a plugin. The difference between Gears and flash/silverlight still seems relevant. Gears tries to extend the browser platform, but not change the programming paradigm (ajax). Silverlight and Flash introduce a new programming paradigm.

Gears is already not just offline storage (worker pool, database, etc.) and assuming some of the APIs Dion is proposing in the URL above gets implemented, it can become much more.

They may be offering different things now, but there is a sense that they are alternative approaches to RIA.

Personal use case, going forward, we may be able to use Gears to solve some of the shortcomings we face with our ajax applications; use proposed gears desktop api to integrate with desktop or use a future version of prism. End result would still be an ajax application with desktop integration. Or we may change direction and rewrite the app with flex and run in AIR.

By: John Dowdell

John Dowdell — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 11:02:21 +0000

uhm, Berkay, Google Gears *is* a browser plugin. It's like Adobe Flash Player, but just for greater-than-cookiesized local data storage.

AIR is neither a plugin nor "a browser", although AIR contains an HTML rendering engine like browsers do. AIR itself doesn't browse among webpages so much as enable webpage creators to provide a more capable desktop experience than what a WWW browser alone can safely offer.

Mozilla Prism is a way for webpage *users* to wrap an existing webpage in its own browser. Its appearance is similar to AIR, but its scope is that of today's web browsers.

The press releases may come out at the same time, but if you look at the technologies, they offer very different things.

jd/adobe

By: Berkay

Berkay — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 07:29:55 +0000

I'm not surprised that Google Gears bleeds into RI discussions. Gears is more than offline support. If Dion Almeer's thoughts are any indication, Gears aims to solve the most common problems developers face while developing ajax applications in a cross browser manner without having to wait for browser developers.

Several of the APIs proposed by Dion would go a long way alleviating some of the problems we currently struggle with.

To me, Gears is different than flash/silverlight as it attempts to solve the problems within the browser paradigm, rather than "forking the web" using plugins.

Here is the link to Dion's post(s)
http://almaer.com/blog/gears-future-apis-services…