Questions for Google
Dare Obasanjo asks some good questions about Google Gears, and how much it really helps the average developer:
I don't consider myself some sort of expert on data synchronization protocols but it seems to me that there is a lot more to figuring out a data synchronization strategy than whether it should be done based on user action or automatically in the background without user intervention. It seems that there would be all sorts of decisions around consistency models and single vs. multi-master designs that developers would have to make as well. And that's just for a fairly straightforward application like Google Reader . Can you imagine what it would be like to use Google Gears to replicate the functionality of Outlook in the offline mode of Gmail or to make Google Docs & Spreadsheets behave properly when presented with conflicting versions of a document or spreadsheet because the user updated it from the Web and in offline mode?
I hadn't really given Gears much thought, but Dare's right - Google has tossed a database API at us and called online/offline synchronization solved. Hmm - by that logic, I can take Seaside, note that Smalltalk database APIs exist, and call Seaside persistence "solved".
I suspect that most people would spot the flaw in any such claim I tried to make for my product; maybe Dare's post will make people do the same for Gears.
Technorati Tags: Google Gears, data synchronization
Comments
google never claimed that
[or] June 6, 2007 10:54:29.968
Only issue is that Google never claimed what you are saying. Google never said they solved all the problem. In fact, they said that they did not, and had alot more to do. They made Gears open source so as to gain help from the community.
Good statement...
[anon] June 6, 2007 12:40:51.891
"Hmm - by that logic, I can take Seaside, note that Smalltalk database APIs exist, and call Seaside persistence "solved"." So true :)... so you do see what we crave or atleast acknowledge its existence We're making progress...
Yeah, so, no...
[Byron] June 6, 2007 15:50:31.178
Yeah, I was at the talk where they introduced Gears and what they actually said, out loud, in words, was "we wrote some stuff so you can sync in the background without freezing your browser." They also said "sync is really hard and usually very problem specific, we didn't even try to address that problem in Gears." The only thing they claim to sync is your infrastructure (if you give them a manifest) so that there are local copies of static images and CSS files and whatnot.