Google Gears

Juicy stuff from Google. They recently unveiled Google Gears. From their website:

Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. Gears provides three key features:

- A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server
- A database, to store and access data from within the browser
- A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background

I see lots of applications for this technology. In essence, it lets you do offline work or when a connection to the web isn't available. For example, someone who does disaster claims can still perform work (via the browser) while in a remote stricken area. The person can just sync the offline data with a central database at a later time soon as a connection is available.