Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs
Phew, I am still getting over Google I/O. It is interesting to be on the inside and see the build up to the event itself. We were getting excited to hold our largest event with the developer community to date. It didn't dissapoint, and I was very happy to see developers from all walk of lives and companies. I met programmers from Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Yahoo!, MySpace, and I could keep on going.
The show started well for me as I got to see a project that I have been passionate about launch, the AJAX Libraries API which has us hosting popular open source Ajax libraries on the Google infrastructure. This release is the first step and we look forward to pushing forward with the goal of aggressively getting libraries that many developers use in browsers as fast as possible. If we are successful then we can start to think of these libraries as a standard library of sorts. The community has already started to build interesting tools around this new service. For example, you can now install a Wordpress plugin that rewrites your page to use your library of choice on Google's servers.
Gears was launched at last years Google Developer Day, and the coming out party for this years birthday was a debranding of "Google Gears" to "Gears" to reflect the community effort. Talks by the Gears engineers showed new APIs in the works, how we are working with HTML5 and standards, Gears for Mobile demonstrations, and the MySpace Messaging launch that uses Gears to enable a new search feature that offloads processing from their data centers and gives lightning fast results.
App Engine came out in the keynote sharing the fact that anyone can signup now, the expected pricing model (important to note that the starting point will ALWAYS be free), and new APIs that work with Email and Memcached.
The Geo world had another set of news. Google Earth can now be used in the browser thanks to a new plugin that allows you to add a quick line of JavaScript to your Maps API code to see it in action.
Finally, in housekeeping news, the Maps API blog has been transformed to the new Geo Developer Blog, so update your feed readers.
What else?
Google Web Toolkit 1.5 Release Candidate: The new release candidate is a big one, with big new features. The GWT sessions at I/O were all packed, and I heard a lot of people walking out talking about how the difficult nature of Ajax development means they will be giving GWT a try.
Google Visualization API update: The "GViz" API was launched within Google Spreadsheets, but now it has been expanded to live elsewhere. This includes a new JavaScript API to create add-hoc data tables on the client.
Google Contacts API update: The Contacts API now supports contact groups, photos, extended properties, and batch processing
Finally, to end with a bit of fun. Aaron Spangler created something very cool with his 20% time. Along with a colleague, he created Radish an indoor solar-powered calendar display that hooked into Google Calendar and once ever hour updates via epaper.
Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs
With Google I/O around the corner on May 28-29th in San Francisco, you can feel excitement bubbling within the Google Developer Programs team and beyond.
We had another Campfire One this week, and this time the team introduced Friend Connect, a way to easily add social features to your website using open protocols such as OpenID, OAuth, and OpenSocial APIs. Below is a short walk through:
The previous Campfire One was held to announce Google App Engine, and the engines continue to roar. If you are a Mac user, you may be interested to view the native App Engine Launcher, which allows you to manage your work form a UI that you know and love.
You will want to be able to write a scalable application, and Ken Ashcraft has written up some tips to do just that.
The Geo teams also had some interesting releases. First we had the long awaited official Flash API, and then we saw the new ability to find photos and Wikipedia content right in the Maps UI.
If you really liked the My Map editing tools that were made available on the Google Maps destination site, you will be happy to know that a quick polyline.enableDrawing(); will turn it on for your own mashup, hanks to new API support.
Google Doctype is a bold new undertaking spearheaded by the prolific Mark Pilgrim. Doctype aims to build a test-driven reference to the Open Web. Mark "humbly offers this fledgling encyclopedia under a Creative Commons Attribution license, and we invite the web developers of the world to contribute to it."
When you think of developers around the world, you think of translation. The AJAX Language API can now piggy back on Google Translate adding 10 new languages.
As always, listen in to the Google Developers channel, and I hope to see a bunch of you at Google I/O. If you can't make it, be sure to follow us on Twitter as we discuss the event in real-time.2013, By: Seo Master
Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs
The big buzz continues to revolve around our Google App Engine launch. We are seeing a host of applications being developed, and were even pleasantly surprised to see people port the APIs allowing you to run App Engine code elsewhere, such as appdrop.com.
One interesting feature to the App Engine which you may not have noticed, is the integration with Google Apps. Not only can you tie an application to your domain (allowing you to have myapp.mydomain.com instead of myapp.appspot.com) but you can restrict access to the given application to only members of your domain. If I ran a company on Google Apps, this would be a nice addition. I could see the small business apps that I need running there.
Jeff Scudder then released a new version of the Google data Python client library which has support for Google App Engine and the Contacts API. If you want to use this in your Google App Engine application you simply need to set gdata.service.http_request_handler = gdata.urlfetch to make sure your requests have a path out!
Google Docs offline, and Gears
I was on the road, speaking about Gears and the Open Web in Europe last week, and it was perfect timing to be mixing with the community as Google App Engine came out and I could talk to that too. We also had a few things to talk about with Gears.
We have been getting lots of questions surrounding our stance with the various standards out there, so Aaron Boodman put down our thoughts on the matter in a piece called Gears and Standards. It talks about how we are working with HTML5, and the direction that you will see Gears going. I think it is incredibly exciting to see people realise how Gears is a lot more than "offline", and is actually an open source way to teach browsers new tricks.
Brad Neuberg talked about just that as well as new features in Gears, and tools to help you get your work done, such as PubTools. He also discussed our first Google Gears for Mobile application, done by the Picasa Team. Now the blokes in London can show off pictures of their kids as they slow poke through the city down in the tube.
The biggest news of all though was the launch of Google Docs offline. If you have ever been in the situation where the internet goes flaky right when you just need that bit of info in document, no more. Now you have the option to save docs locally on your computer, so you can access them no matter where you are.
The Geo side of the house continued to output great content, including a series of Geo Developer content:
Quick & Dirty KML Creation: With Mano Marks, Pamela Fox, and Christiaan Adams A demonstration of creating KML visually in Google Earth & Google Maps, and using Spreadsheet Mapper 2.0
Creating Custom Maps: With John Coryat A comparison of various ways of overlaying data in the Maps API and an in-depth explanation of creating tile layers and custom map types
GigaPan In-Depth: With Randy Sargent & Ted Morse A demo of the GigaPan panorama-browsing website and KML files, plus a technical explanation of PhotoOverlay
Dynamic KML: With Mano Marks & Brian Hamlin An exploration of using dynamic queries from KML, using the NetworkLink, httpQuery, and viewFormat elements, plus a demo of a PostGIS-generated NetworkLink
Mars, Moon, and Sky Map Types: With Noel Gorelick A talk introducing the non-Earth Maps API map types, plus cool demos of other types of projections used with planetary imagery
Mapping the Votes: With Michael Geary A whirlwind tour of what it took to create the Elections 2008 Map/Mapplet/Gadget, including SHPfile conversion, Javascript optimization, centroid calculations, Twitter updates collection, Mapplet API tricks, and more.
They were also happy to announce that KML is now a standard, and owned by the Open Geospatial Consortium. We have seen a lot of other sites consume and produce KML, so this is a great step.
Finally, a great new feature was added to Google Maps. You can now check out traffic patterns in the future. If you have a commute the following morning, you can check out an estimate of how stuck you will be based on past experience. Obviously, it can't determine if there will be any crashes or anything like that :)
And there's more...
To finish up, a few other interesting items of the week:
Google Code now speaks a lot of languages which apparently caused some students to fix their RSS feed parsers as they didn't grok Unicode
I hope you had a great week. Remember that our big developer event Google I/O is now just a few weeks away! We have a few posts from presenters who will be at the event to give you a little look at the content, but the best part will be having the community together to talk in the open.2013, By: Seo Master
Seo Master present to you: By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs
I got to meet developers in Colorado this week. Working from the Google Boulder office with its fun climbing wall (*so* Boulder) was a treat, and there were several API announcements that were really exciting.
First of all we had the YouTube API update. The new APIs for YouTube are very broad. Not only do you have new access via AtomPub (e.g. to upload), but you can now have fantastic control of the player with a very simple JavaScript API.
The AJAX Search and Feeds team is happy to announce a new member to their API family -- the Language API. This new API boasts two functions, language translation and language detection - which cover 13 languages and 29 translation pairs.
All this with a couple of simple JavaScript calls such as this:
We are excited to launch the Google Visualization API, a new API designed for visualizing structured data. The API adds the ability to send queries to data sources and process the response. The first data source that already supports this API is Google Spreadsheets. We are also launching a set of visualization gadgets that use this API.
With this API, you can read data from a data source that supports the API. You can read an entire table, or you can run a query on the data source using the API's query language. The query response is an easy to process data table designed to simplify data visualization. It includes both the underlying values and the formatted values, column types, headers and more.
Staying with visualization and charting... we had a great response to the initial Google Chart API launch, and the team came back with new features allowing very cool new graph types, and lifting the limits on chart calls.
All of these APIs share the same property of doing their thing very well, and providing a simple API to the developer. I hope you will agree, and if not, let us know what you need!
In the land of Google Gears, a couple of external libraries were features. Malte Ubl provided a nice little abstraction for cross domain messaging which uses HTML 5 postMessage(), else Gears, else a browser hack to make the beast work on all browsers.
That is for Worker pools, and with the Database API we saw Aptana releasing an update to their server-side JavaScript database API allowing you to use the Gears API on the server.
Then we added an interactive developer guide that allows you to try code on the fly as you go through the GData JavaScript API. It feels good to be able to massage and play as you go.
Finally, we announced Google I/O which is "a two day developer gathering on May 28th & 29th in San Francisco. The purpose of the event is to bring developers together to learn about products, tools, and techniques which are moving the web forward as a platform." If you would like to mingle and join Google engineers, and other Web luminaries as we discuss how to move the Web forward, join us!2013, By: Seo Master
