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.
Do you still have this script? Both examples are 404s at the moment…
Yes, you can find it here: http://code.google.com/p/glazkov-attic/source/browse/#svn/trunk/html5-sql-player