I had the pleasure to
head to my home town (London, England) to participate in the Future of Web Apps conference that brought
together an interesting set of developers who want to take a glimpse at the future.... and the
present.
I gave a presentation at the conference on Google Gears that
covered all of the core components (Database, LocalServer, WorkerPool) and also showed off
some of the great work that the community has been working on (libraries that work on top of
the APIs, great examples, etc).
I really enjoyed the many questions
that I got at the end of the talk, and through out the conference. Being in Europe, it was
very interesting to see many questions on mobile Gears. The questions came in from app
developers, mobile phone vendors, and phone networks alike. It seems that it is a common wish
to have the offline abilities on their phones. I quickly realized why this was the case from
the Londoners.... the tube! They need to put network repeaters in the tube, but since they
have found it impossible to get air conditioning down there, I doubt that will happen any time
soon!
I also got to talk to developers about architecture practices
around the applications that they are taking offline. As always, it was interesting to talk to
developers working with this in the real world.
