Developers are putting Google Gears to some interesting uses, including offline support for Ruby on Rails and building client-side search engines.

Gears for Rails represents another boost to cloud computing in its ability to deliver offline capability and synchronization. Meanwhile, Microsoft is leading its own data synchronization charge with its Live Mesh cloud-based data synchronization system, a test build of which is now open to the public.

However, Google has pushed its way into the cloud-based development world. And the third-party Gears for Rails solution also represents another call for Google to open up its Google App Engine platform to other languages, such as Ruby. Currently, the Google App Engine development platform supports Python only.

Michael Marcus and Rui Ma, two recent graduates from the information systems masters program at New York University, have designed a development framework called Gears on Rails. Google Gears is an open-source browser extension that lets developers create Web applications that can run offline. Gears on Rails is an open-source project that plugs Google Gears into Ruby on Rails, enabling developers to take a Ruby on Rails code base offline.

Read the rest of this article on eWEEK.com.