Fwd: Re: Scripture Tools for Every Pastor

Right, time to dip my toes into the world of offline web applications…

Initial searches included:
> lightweight javascript http servers  red herring.
> HTML5 - looks promising but its not here quite yet
> Google labs… Google Gears.

I think Google Gears is the way to go. It's all new to me but it's basically some JavaScript libraries tagged onto the browser (via plugins) that give you more access to local features as well as a database and a server. There's a lot of detail on the project website.
http://code.google.com/apis/gears/

Supports IE6 or higher which is a reasonable requirement for the average Windows user. It's open source so we can bundle it on the USB stick (we could also bundle CSS-friendly browsers  mozilla etc.) GearsSetup.exe is only 544KB.

Mobile support looks promising: (taken from http://code.google.com/apis/gears/gears_faq.html - nice page)

        * Microsoft Windows Mobile (5 or higher)
              o Internet Explorer 4.01 or higher
              o Opera Mobile 9.51 (Presto build 2.1.0+) (Windows Mobile 6 touchscreen devices only)
              o The following devices are not supported
                    + Samsung i320 and i320N
                    + Orange SPV C600
                    + Motorola Q
        * Android 1.0

Obliviously mobile stuff is a long time away in the future concern.

Overall…

It's beta, bleeding-edge but seems pretty intuitive. This is all based just on initial observations etc. Learning curve is probably steep but its very interesting. However, I'm not sure if it's meant to be used to build a totally offline application but it seems to be a solution to taking only some aspects of a web application offline.

A personal interest at the moment…

I'm not A*mazing in JavaScript but I can hack away. So I've been looking (note looking at) at GWT  Google Web Toolkit  but I haven't had the time yet to try out in any significant way. Basically, you write the UI in Java and it compiles it down to JavaScript for you. The nice thing about this Google Java Toolkit stuff is that it can be deployed quite easily on AppEngine now, since they are now allowing Java applications. There is also a GWT Java library representing the Gears JavaScript APIs.
http://code.google.com/docreader/#p=gwt-google-apis&s=gwt-google-apis&t=GearsGettingStarted
Caution: the technology is there… not sure if I am competent though.