Anand Iyer’s on his blog Artificial Ignorance posts Silverlight + Gears = SilverGears?. Anand refers to Ashish Shetty who describes the integration using Microsoft Silverlight and Google Gears.
Microsoft Silverlight - A solution for delivering video, interactivity and animation by browser for Mac and Windows.
Google Gears – An open source browser extension enabling web applications to provide offline functionality using JavaScript APIs.
It makes sense that these applications can work together. Silverlight can be used to deliver a rich media experience, ala RIA, while Gears can be used to store and manage data locally specific to Silverlight.
Silverlight does have its own storage system, but Gears has persistent storage that will be available when offline.
Ashish Shetty of Even a chimp can write code has an explanation of the process, as well as a Silverlight / Gears sample to get the ball rolling – that he coded in about 5 minutes.
It is great examples like these that show you can use the best of both systems to create a better solution.
Update 7/12/07 – The Silverlight / Gears sample page hosted on http://www.simplegeek.com by Chris Anderson, and does not appear to currently be available. I will add an update when the sample is available again, or add a new link if the page is relocated.
Update 8/16/07 - Update Silverlight / Gears demo link to http://www.simplegeek.com/SilverGears/default.html. Thanks to Matthew for the updated link.
Technorati tags: Microsoft, Silverlight, Google, Gears, Anand Iyer, Ashish Shetty, RIA
June 7, 2007 at 4:18 am
[...] Silverlight and Google Gears New! [...]
July 12, 2007 at 2:40 am
Interesting integration. But what happened to the Silverlight/Gears article, your link is broken? Maybe Microsoft is not happy about this type of integration with Google?
Thank you for investigating!
July 12, 2007 at 7:27 am
Ralf – Thanks for the heads up on the broken link. The sample is hosted on http://www.simplegeek.com, that I have no control over.
Hopefully the sample will be available soon – the demo is simple but cool.
August 12, 2007 at 9:37 pm
Try this site:
http://www.simplegeek.com/SilverGears/default.html
August 15, 2007 at 2:46 pm
Matthew – Thank you for the updated link to the SilverGears demo. That is an excellent demo.
August 20, 2008 at 9:49 am
I had no luck getting this demo to work on OS X 10.5.4. I running it on the newest version of Firefox3 and Safari, but no luck. I have SilverLight installed, I think. I downloaded one from Microsoft, and then I had to download another one from another website that ran a SilverLight app, since it didn’t allow me to view the content without installing the plugin (which I already had done?).
Strange, huh?
February 10, 2010 at 3:00 pm
If you want to work with a native Silverlight database you can use siaqodb ( http://siaqodb.com ). It store objects directly on client machine, objects are retrieved back using LINQ.
February 24, 2010 at 11:04 am
you have a wonderful site!