Posted by Dion Almaer, Gears TeamMalte Ubl, who brought us xssinterface, has a new project that has Gears support.Joose is a self-hosting meta object system for JavaScript inspired by the Perl Moose. Joose supports inheritance, traits, mixins, method wrappers and more.Where Gears comes into the mix is through the Joose.Gears meta class which enables automatic delegation of methods to be executed as a Gears worker. If Gears is not present, the worker is executed in the main thread. The workers result will be sent to a method called "on".ucfirst($worker_name) if available:Class("HardWork", { meta: Joose.Gears, has: { data: {is: rw, init: {}} }, methods: { onDoWork: function (result) { ok(result == 1001, "Gear Worker returns correct result") } }, workers: { doWork: function (start) { var counter = start; for(var i = 0; i < 1000; i++) { counter++ } return counter } }})var hw = new HardWork();hw.doWork(1)You can take a peak at the innards to see another interesting use of Gears.

Jadon reports: 

A while back, I wrote-up a "Collaborative GreaseMonkey" patent disclosure. It was a defensive measure to make sure no one else patented the idea and prevented the rest of us from using it. The disclosure never made it past our patent committee, and I think that is fine, since it is at least documented as prior art in some way. The code never got to the point where it was worth sharing, but I do plan to revive it at some point.

I'm seeing that more and more people are starting to get ideas that are more and more similar to what I had in mind. Today, I read about someone dreaming up thoughts on using Google Gears to perform OpenID and OAuth. I like the thought pattern.

Gears, GreaseMonkey, OpenID, and P2PSockets (JXTA) have the potential to re-invent the web and to establish a real web operating system. Gears enables the JavaScript written into web pages to become part of a real, persistent application with persistent data storage and threads. GreaseMonkey provides a solution to edit existing web applications with user-controled, local customizations and to create applications fully local, without needing to learn how to write a web server application. OpenID gives a single solution for authenticating yourself across those web applications. P2PSockets allows the applications and data you host locally to be discovered on the web without needing to own a web server.

The result is an application building environment that is an incremental step from simple HTML+JavaScript editing and allows everyone to invent their own web, rather than just rely on the web that the social networking sites control today.

The success of this web is, of course, controlled by the economy it creates. An a-la-carte business model, like the one provided by Amazon's web services, is a great way to ensure that the bandwidth and data storage necessary for the locally-hosted services to scale.

Thoughts?

 

>Original article

Olivier Margerand reports:

Louis found a great Firefox add-on yesterday: gDocsBar, Google Docs Companion for Firefox. As soon as I read his message, I went straight to the gDocsBar website, browsed through for a few seconds and installed this extension.

gDocsBar comes into Firefox as an additional sidebar that allows you to manage your Docs but also gives you some functions that don't exist in the native web interface.

Now I've got one tab less and one more powerful set of functions. As you can guess, gDocsBar was not developed nor released by Google (who offers Google Docs) or Mozilla (Firefox's publishing foundation). It is indeed yet another example that third parties rapidly come as smart complements to global user-friendly platforms. As a matter of fact, it's the way Firefox is developed: a light, easy-to-use browser with minimal functions that you can customize without any other limit than... your screen's size and computer's resources! It aims at fitting the needs of 80% of its users without bugging them with unwanted complex tools.

So here is a short list of why I already love gDocsBar (which has already changed the way I work):

• Much quicker interaction than when using the web interface: you get anything you need in a snap!
• Exclusive functions:
  • Templates (to make a couple of our clients happy!)
  • Smart Folders
  • Drag-and-Drop local files or even file groups to upload them directly to Google Docs
  • Easy webclips (webpage parts) saving

Also see gDocsBar's blog and subscribe to its RSS feed to get the latest news about it! I just posted a comment to ask gDocsBar's developer(s) for a link to Google Apps Docs Home, not personal Docs Home.

Pay attention to the button that comes on the left of your address bar, which allows you to expand and collapse gDocsBar as often as you want. (or you can use the dedicated shortcut: see Display > Sidebar to get the right one).

Of course, this only works with Firefox, as this browser allows anyone to develop new integrated functions.

Thank you, gDocsBar !

>Original article

Posted by Brian Shih, Google Gadgets TeamOnce again, our very own Dann Lee stars in a great tutorial on building gadgets. In this video, you'll learn how to write a gadget step-by-step. We'll take one of our popular gadgets and show you how to build your own version from scratch. The gadget example uses various API features such as tabs, dynamic-height, and analytics. By the end of the video, you'll have a better understanding on how to create your own successful gadget in addition to learning key points about distribution. Have fun!As always, if you've got further questions, please drop by the group.