One of the major criticisms of internet applications have been the lack of offline support. If you build your enterprise application as a web application, there is no way your salesman can use it in offline mode on the plane. Looks like Google is about to change this with Google Gears, a browser plug-in that exposes JavaScript APIs to add offline storage to web applications. Google Gears uses Sqlite3 as it backend store, so now you can create tables and perform SQL calls from JavaScript inside the browser.

Another component of Google Gears is a light weight process pool that let's you do multi threading inside your web application.

I just installed the plug-in and run the samples. Nothing to flashy about the samples on Google's site, but they work as expected. They even have a sample downloading all the JS, HTML and CSS of a page, letting you run the entire thing in offline mode. Nifty!

These are some interesting times for rich internet applications. Imagine the applications you could build combining Google Gears with Microsoft Silverlight. Cross platform, cross browser, rich, disconnected web applications. My only concern might be that we're getting more and more dependent on third party plug-ins to get the full web experience. It's no longer all about the W3C standards. But I guess it's been like this for quite some time now. Browsing the web with out a flash player isn't a pleasant experience…