I’ve been working on a project using Google Gears for the last few weeks and I’ve hacked together some classes to allow the user of the Open Rico Live Grid to use Gears to operate offline. A result of using Gears to take an application offline is that it is much easier to move data around in a raw data type format as oppose to a markup format that you might use if you can format the data on the server. The advantage is that if your server produces raw data and your Gears database produces raw data, then you can do all of your formating in one place. In the browser via JavaScript. If your server is pushing fragments of markup to your page via AJAX, then when you need to replicate that functionality offline, you have to grab the data from the local DB and then format via JS and try to produce the same markup that your server is producing. Then when you need to change something, you get to change it twice. Boo!

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I’m not sure how many times I’ve heard local business owners say that the Internet doesn’t really apply to their business. When we started our business adventure in 1999, I think that many businesses could have made a strong argument that that was true. The Internet had not really impacted their business, because the new business they needed to continue to grow was being delivered by phone book advertising. (more…)