

Ask YC: Anyone using Google Gears or any other client-server sync solution for their startup webapp? - nreece

If so, how has your experience been?
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hbien
Yes, sort of. I've been using Gears for a side project of mine (Django on the
server side) and it's been pretty fun.

You'll have to decide whether to do modal or modeless syncing and modeless
takes a lot more time to implement. It's probably a good idea to step back
from coding and architecting how the syncing process will work.

Also, I feel like I'm writing PHP again because I'm not using an ORM. I'm just
using a CRUD wrapper around Gears' database support.

The app I'm writing is a one-page application though, it loads once and uses
AJAX for the rest of the user's session. I put all AJAX calls into a module
and have an online/offline check to see whether to update the database locally
or remotely.

At work, we sync between handhelds/desktop apps (VB) and a web app (Rails). We
just send JSON back and forth. The down side is that we have two code bases
and some parts are duplicated.

