Shelley Powers is trying out Google Gears, and Dion Almaer already has an implementation for one of his web applications. The simple explanation of Gears is that it adds a two-way VCR to your browser. The browser stores relevant data from the web application so that it can be accessed even when the user is not online, and it saves relevant user input to be played back to the web application when the user goes back online.
Just taking a quick look at Dion's sample code, it's clear that this functionality adds a whole new layer of complexity to browser coding. Now suddenly you have to be concerned with creating a data storage model and maintaining data consistency between the browser client's long-term storage and the web server. There's a lot of low level code to write and maintain.
It's hard not to think of Rich Skrenta's observation that the more code you have to write, the more things you have that will eventually go wrong. Rich's comment suggests that the benefits of the two-way VCR capability will have to be pretty high for gears to attain long term viability.
If the Gears capability were somehow built transparently into the browser with a standard API, the prognosis would seem much brighter. Rumblings suggest that that is indeed the direction things are taking.
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