Opera Unite and Gears LocalServer are completely different. (I'm using the LocalServer API for the application I'm writing at work.)
LocalServer saves a set of static files (e.g. HTML, JavaScript, CSS, images) from the web. When the browser requests those files later, they will be served from the LocalServer disk cache instead of the remote server. So the pages will load faster and can be available offline (if the pages are designed to run without accessing any other network resources). It's like a browser cache on steroids. For an example application, see the latest version of WordPress, which has an option to load the admin UI into a LocalServer cache.
LocalServer lets you serve requests from disk to browser on a single computer, while Unite lets you serve requests from one computer to another over the internet. LocalServer is useful for offline work, while Unite is useful for communicating on a network.
If you used Unite for a single-user application (where the client and server are all on one machine) then it might provide some of the functionality of Gears LocalServer. But I suspect that the use of a central proxy server in Unite would eliminate both the performance benefits and offline features for this scenario.
LocalServer saves a set of static files (e.g. HTML, JavaScript, CSS, images) from the web. When the browser requests those files later, they will be served from the LocalServer disk cache instead of the remote server. So the pages will load faster and can be available offline (if the pages are designed to run without accessing any other network resources). It's like a browser cache on steroids. For an example application, see the latest version of WordPress, which has an option to load the admin UI into a LocalServer cache.
LocalServer lets you serve requests from disk to browser on a single computer, while Unite lets you serve requests from one computer to another over the internet. LocalServer is useful for offline work, while Unite is useful for communicating on a network.
If you used Unite for a single-user application (where the client and server are all on one machine) then it might provide some of the functionality of Gears LocalServer. But I suspect that the use of a central proxy server in Unite would eliminate both the performance benefits and offline features for this scenario.