Android Open Handset Developers Community

I have linked in this thread a very good presentation from Google I/O 2008, talking about web applications.
Which is your thinking about web applications ?

Barban

Power Up your Mobile Web App

If you've ever tried coding up a mobile client application, you've probably noticed that the huge variety of mobile operating systems makes it tough to build rich applications that work on every device. But what if developers could deploy applications directly to mobile browsers rather than develop native applications? Google Gears for Mobile is a mobile browser extension for creating rich web applications for mobile devices. This session will show you how Gears for Mobile can be used to develop offline capability into your mobile web apps and how to create slick and responsive applications by hiding latency issues through controlled data caching and storage between sessions.

I fully support the view that the best way to delive and make available applications on mobile devices is by relying on a standard web browser platform.

And fortunately we do already have a widely used, stable and well written web platform for mobile devices: WebKit

Gears by Google is a plugin based on WebKit, so it is a further way to improove this platform more.

Zoltan

From the video, it is also interesting the comparison between Gears and AJAX.
As remarked by the presenter, it seems to me that the possibility for the application's user interface to communicate with a local user database is a key feature to speed up web applications. In such a way, it is not necessary to retrieve session data from the network and to check if the client is aligned with the state of the application saved on the server side.

Verix

I agree, by watching the video, I also realized that Gears is far more a way to work with web applications offline (it seems to me a too much restrictive way of seeing this platform).

barban