Everyone is buzzing about Web 2.0. For the ordinary Joe Soap, Web 2.0 doesn’t mean a whole lot. It’s hard to define for the end user, the end user who just wants to send email, watch some youTube videos, and browse their favourite websites.
I think the one thing that the ordinary user can understand is the concept of Web Applications. Instead of installing an entire Office Suite on their computer, the user can just go to their preferred office site and run the application within their browser. This is Web 2.0 at work. No need to worry about upgrades, or paying for programs that won’t be used. As long as you have an Interent connection, you can work. Sounds easy, and from the end user point of view it is. There is a catch. What happens when there is no Internet connection available? How do you work?
Google are hoping to provide an answer to that question with the introduction of Google Gears. Google Gears allows website designers to make the applications they create available to the end user even when the user cannot visit the website.
Gears is basically a database and server that lives on the users hard-drive. The server stands in for the webs-server when the computer is off-line, and the the database stores whatever information is required. While the concept may be simple, the implementation is not. It takes a lot of time and effort to make something like this work. Used in association with Google Docs and Spreadsheets, this technology could prove to be a major competitor for Microsoft Office.
Along with the technical coding difficulties there are also security considerations that need to be looked at. Using a common method for allowing remote applications to access your hard-drive opens a whole can of worms. For example, it’s going to take a lot of work to ensure that the data stored on your computer from one website is not accessible by another application on another site.
From the limited amount of security information that is available on the Google Gears site, it does look that a lot of thought has gone into the security model, but until this is tested in the real world, it’s hard to know it will be sufficient to protect the end user. It will be interesting to see how this works out.