Speed Up Static Resources
Gears can speed up your web application using the LocalServer module. WordPress, a popular blogging platform, uses Gears and the LocalServer module to significantly improve the performance of common operations. WordPress incorporates a rich text editor that makes authoring posts much easier. However, this editor has a ton of associated resources, such as CSS, JavaScript, images, etc. (more than a hundred!). Downloading these resources, including seeing if they have changed using traditional HTTP caching, can affect the performance of using the editor, especially on latent connections.
Instead, WordPress decided to download all of these resources into a Gears LocalServer. The Gears LocalServer makes it possible to version a bundle of resources, such as JavaScript, CSS, etc. and grab them in one shot. Once files have been stored in the Gears LocalServer they are served up locally and immediately, blitting to the screen right when the page is first hit.
A common question is how this is different than standard HTTP caching. Standard HTTP caching can only version individual resources, and must do validity checks on every resource at regular intervals which can affect page load time. The Gears LocalServer instead versions an entire bundle, efficiently checking that resources have changed only if the version on the bundle itself has changed. Another major difference is that Gears always serves the resources first, then revalidates the bundle. In traditional HTTP caching, you have to either choose between choosing some date far in the future to revalidate at, or revalidating before serving.
Cache Data and Use Search Locally
A great next step is to use the Gears’ Full Text Search capabilities to give your users very fast local search. This can be used in conjunction with the Gears Database module to cache commonly used data for faster display and retrieval.
MySpace does this with their MySpace Mail feature. They download all of a users messages in the background using a Gears WorkerPool, index them into the Database for quick retrieval, and then drop a search form on to the page. As a user types the local database is queried in real-time, with the results shown instantaneously on the page without the latency of a round-trip server call.
You can also use the local database to cache commonly used data, such as zip code lookup tables or employee contact information. For example, MySpace uses this to provide fast, client-side sorts. A user can click the sort icon while viewing messages to sort by read/unread, date sent, sender, etc. Rather than having to return to the server, affecting performance, the sort happens very fast on the client-side using SQL against the local database.