Is Google Gears Really a Long-term Solution?

Question

I am thinking about using Gears in a project, but I have doubts about it.

Do you think that Gears will really be (or already were) accepted by the community as the state-of-art solution for what it purposes?

Although Gears seems to be awesome, I think that the community is kind of scared to use it.

What do you think about it?

Answer 1

Google has invested a lot of time in it and has also integrated it into some of their web apps. I imagine its here to stay for a while but then there is always risk involved with stuff like this.

Answer 2

Google is about to roll out "offline GMail", which is built on Gears. Given the market share of GMail, I'd expect that to be the killer app for Gears adoption.

But it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future. You might want to wait, if you can afford to, and see how offline GMail catches on.

Answer 3

There is always risk with any platform, but at least with this one google are eating their own dog food. I.e. It is required for gmail offline, it is the way you'll take google docs offline.

I think you're probably as safe with Gears from a continued support perspective as you are with most other frameworks. If it meets your needs as it is in its current state, it sounds like a good fit.

Answer 4

Gears have SQL engine (SQLite), with scripting (Javascript), and good internet support.

In fact, I don't see anything like it on the market.

And there is the potential to position Gears as serious client side framework, if Google manage to push Gears on small devices (on which both SQLite and javascrpt allready work).

They don't seem to hurry. Can't tell why.

Answer 5

The client side storage in HTML 5 will provide an upgrade path from Gears, should Google ever decide to deprecate Gears. There's an interesting article about Google using an abstraction layer so that Gears is not required on browsers supporting HTML 5 client-side storage.

Answer 6

Google Gears is not a long-term solution. On February 19, 2010, Google announced that Gears is being discontinued, and that they believe the correct solution is through standards-complaint options such as HTML5.