Something new is cooking in the Google software pot. It “s called Google Gears, which is a new way to create offline Web applications.

“Google Gears (BETA) is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs: store and serve application resources locally, store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database, run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness rdquo;.

They made this announcement during Google Developers Day in Sydney, Australia.

One of the major features of upcoming Adobe Apollo is support disconnected Web applications, and Adobe “s Kevin Lynch announced that Google Gears will be available in Apollo. Adobe Flex applications already use the space on the client “s disk for storing instances of any objects (this is called local SharedObjects), and turning this disk space into a fully searchable RDBMS sounds pretty exciting to me. While some people sitting on fast Internet connection lines may not see benefits of working offline, most of the world population is still using slow lines. And even if you have fa ast connection, having some data on your local disk may help if you work with enterprise applications that move megabytes of data over the wire.

Last year Sun Microsystems have included a client database Java DB in Java 6, which would be more useful if Java offered a competitive Web client VM. This situation won “t change for at least a year (we are expecting a small footprint Consumer JRE next year). It ‘s been a year since Java 6 has been released – has anyone heard of applications that use Java DB? At least I did not.

I wonder why Sun and Adobe do not collaborate? Sun is moving aside with new JavaFX toy, but it “s a little too late. May be they should work on a Java-to-ActionScript compiler that can be converted to bytecode for Flash Player? I ‘m sure David Temkin from Laszlo Systems will be happy to help with this.

No wonder that Google is where it is, and what Sun has on the desktop? As noted writer Isaac Babel wrote many years ago, Sun has “spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart rdquo;.