Google Provides Offline Functionality to Web Apps

Googe recently released "Google Gears" which is a javascript application programming interface that adds offline supports for web applications. This new toolkit was released in conjuction with an update Google Reader that allows for offline support for reading the RSS feeds. Google Gears is a free open source platform. The plugin is a 700K download for Firefox 1.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+ that installs three developer APIs. One API will handle the creation of data objects to store application information locally, another will be a SQLite relational database for searching the data, and the final part will enable asynchronous JavaScript so applications can sync data in the background without overburdening the browser.