I have been tasked with exploring the possibility of offline access of my webapp. What are people's experiences using google gears with rails? I am aware of the gearsonrails project, but it has some really strange constructs and doesn't appear to be under significant, active development.
Are there other options? Has anyone added gears to their existing rails app successfully? Is this super-painful?
Google Gears is dead, development has ceased. You're better off trying to solve your problem using HTML5, which implements APIs that make offline access possible (a client side database that can be queried using a SQL like language and a key-value store.) At this point, none of the major browsers completely implement the (developing) standard. So you have to make the decision between developing against a de facto obsolete plugin, or targeting an emerging standard.