Base diving with Google Gears

By Dion Almaer and Pamela Fox, Google Developer Programs

Pamela and I have been enjoying some time building applications with the ever growing set of Google APIs.

As we build these applications we are capturing some of the decisions you may face in building your own, in a series of articles called Building Better Ajax Applications with Google APIs.

The first article, and application, is a Google Base reader, powered by Google Gears, to enable offline use.

The application had us delving into:

• The various components of Google Gears
• How to use the SQLite local database and helpful wrappers around common patterns
• How to capture web resources to make them available to offline use and the issues that you need to be aware of
• How to use the Google Base Data API, specifically getting JSON output into our application
• How to debug your offline Ajax application.

Please take a peek at the application, type in some search queries, and then read the how-to article.