HTML5 Wrapper for Gears

This is possibly the lowest-hanging fruit ever. After WebKit folks released their implementation of the HTML5 SQL storage specification, Gears immediately became the odd man out, the non-standards-compliant implementation. Never you mind that this part of the spec is still basically a twinkle in Hixie‘s eye. By adding the SQL bit into the latest WebKit nightlies (Windows users are still blissfully unaware of this, by the way), the legendary Apple team put a symbolic stake into the metaphoric ground: this better not be moving anywhere.

So I thought, why not connect the dots? Gears is a capable and much more mature implementation, both WebKit and Gears use the same SQLite server, so it should be just a matter of writing a simple wrapper to bring Gears back into the standards fold.

So here they are, WebKit’s Stickies running in Firefox with Gears, using a tiny bridge script I wrote (see the screenshot on Flickr if you aren’t inclined to install Gears). If you’re running Firefox 3, you may actually be able to write on those stickies. For Firefox 2 users, the lack of contenteditable support means that you can just create, move, and delete the notes. IE users are SOL‘d, because the Stickies sample uses DOM Level 2 events and other happy standards goodies. Do not let this stop you from using the bridge itself, though: it works in IE just peachy-fine.

The script, as I mentioned before, is laughably small and oh yes, incomplete. But I figured, the openDatabase and executeSql support take you about 80% of the way for most Web application development needs, and should the need for the other 20% arise, I would gladly oblige and be your code monkey.

Gearites and Safaritans, if you feel like I encroached on any of your wonderful work by creating this frankenstein, please let me know and we’ll sort this out.