Friday, October 19th, 2007
Blog.gears: An offline Blogger client using the new GData Blogger JavaScript Client
Category: Examples
, Gears, Google, JavaScript, Screencast, Showcase
I was excited when Google announced their first JavaScript API that allows you to write back to a service.
Now, they have released a Blogger client that does the same, which means that you can now manipulate your blog posts directly from JavaScript.
Along with the release there are a few examples such as:
- A tool that takes your upcoming Calendar entries and creates blog posts of the events
- A code snippet that you can add to your website that enables visitors to your site to click on a link to comment on your content on their own blog
- Code that allows you to search blogs on various topics, find entries, and again allow users to comment on their own blog
And finally, Blog.gears, an offline blog editor:
I tend to write a fair share of blog posts, and whenever I am writing them while offline I tend to open up Textmate to do the write-up. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could open up my blog editor and do it all while I am offline?
The architecture behind the editor follows the pattern of:
- The UI looks to the local DB for data
- When an event happens it gets queued
- When an event happens the UI tries to send it to the cloud
- Events have status flags to let the system know what is happening
We interviewed Pamela Fox about the application, and she went through the architecture at a high level, and also did a screencast of the application itself.
Pamela Fox is so hot
Interesting tool, I can see it’s uses for a blog engine. Though in general terms I must say I’m a bit skeptic to Gears, mainly because it reduces your server to a “data storage” and basically forces you to stuff lots of business logic on the client in the form of JavaScript…
I think it would probably be impossible for Gaia to utilize since all that’s rendered in a Gaia app is initiated by some event happening on the server and caching such things in a “cacher” (like Gears) would be impossible…