Offline Access For Gmail On iPhone And Android With HTML 5
At the beginning of 2009 year, Google unveiled the offline access capability of Gmail service for desktop web browsers users (related article: Gmail Can Be Accessed Offline). The offline availability of Gmail service for desktop computers is based on Gears platform, which downloads a local cache of your mail and while an Internet connection exists, the cache will be synchronized with Gmail server.
In the same time, the Gmail offline access is not yet available for iPhone and Android platform users, but according to a presentation at Mobile World Congress made by Vic Gundotra, Vice President of Engineering at Google, this feature will be implemented in the near future and will rely on HTML 5 specifications.
The presentation shown a private version of Gmail which is capable to work offline (in absence of an Internet connection) using the AppCache and Database HTML 5 standards.
Based on these standards, a local database of emails will be saved and the offline Gmail application will providing to the users the same functionality as compared with the online version, with the difference that the new email messages will be sent when an Internet connection is available.
The only requirement is the existence of a HTML 5 compatible browser installed on the mobile device. iPhone and Android platforms include already browsers based on WebKit, which makes possible the running of web based applications built with HTML 5 (additional plugins are not required).
The advantages for developers is represented by the fact that they can create a single application working with the same Graphical User Interface on all platforms (the application will not depend on the type of the operating system).
Related Articles
