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Institute for Computer Research (ICR)

Institute for Computer Research
presents a Seminar on

"A General-purpose Caching Architecture for Offline-capable Web Applications with HTML 5 Databases or Gears"

By: Robert Kroeger
Senior Software Engineer
Google Inc.

Date:  Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Time:  12:00 noon
Place:  University of Waterloo, Davis Centre, Room DC 1302

ABSTRACT
Modern web browsers provide browser-local SQL databases through either a Google Gears plugin or the HTML5 storage APIs. These capabilities permit implementing "offline" web applications -- web applications that operate in the absence of a network connection. This capability is particularly valuable for web applications operating on mobile phones where the network connection can be sporadic. In this talk, I present a brief overview of the Gears and HTML5 APIs for browser-local storage and the cache pattern for architecting offline web applications by their analogy with microprocessor-based systems: the DOM and event handlers as microprocessor, the SQL database as cache and the web server as memory subsystem.

BIO
Since starting at Google in 2007, Robert Kroeger has worked on Gears and HTML5-based offline-capable email solutions. Most recently, he helped design and implement the offline storage portions of the new version of Mobile Gmail for iPhone and Android. Prior to joining Google, Robert worked on cache-coherent cluster interconnects and hardware performance modelling at Sun Microsystems. Robert holds a BSc. in computer science from the University of Ottawa and a MMath and PhD in computer science from the University of Waterloo.