I would be interested to hear thoughts on how CouchDB would compare to Google gears from those that have worked with either. Would it make sense for Google to expand the gears API into some kind of monster that would make it easier to work with app engine or similar by only writing client side JS?<p>What about a JS lib that allows you to interact with gears as if it were CouchDB? This gets you a little wider audience since you only have to ask people to install Google gears. And what user does not trust the Google brand :)
No reason why the machine running the browser can't be a part of "the cloud." (It may be an intermittently connected bandwidth-poor outskirt of it, but a part just the same.)
CouchDB is fantastic, I think it's still too early to see the impact it's going to have down the road... Getting past the RDBMS way of thinking about data really creates opportunity for new applications... I just don't understand the emphasis on offline syncing. Seems like 1999 all over again.