Seo Master present to you: By Scott Knaster, Google Code Blog Editor
Clarke's Third Law states that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". That's exactly how I felt the first time I saw various bits of advanced software: for example, watching a word processor automatically wrap words at the end of a line without having to press Return, seeing the Mac's graphical user interface and learning that I could program it into my apps using ordinary-looking function calls, and watching a search engine take a couple of words and almost instantly find exactly the right web page from among millions.
The Prediction API described in yesterday's post on this blog is a modern piece of software that feels like magic. Using machine learning, the Prediction API examines existing data, determines patterns, and makes educated guesses at answers to questions. For example, if you train a program with phrases in various languages, you can then feed it new phrases and have it determine the language of the new phrases. That's certainly something humans can learn to do; having computers do it sounds remarkable to me, but it's real.
You can use the Prediction API to tell whether user comments are positive or negative, decide which emails are most and least relevant, and identify suspicious activity. If you'd like to add features like these to your apps, please check out yesterday's post.
Turning to a completely different topic, if you're interested at all in making your HTML5 and CSS3 faster, spend half an hour or so watching this talk by Paul Irish from the Google Developer Relations Team. There's a lot in there, including a nifty section about hardware accelerated CSS.
Seo Master present to you: Google Web Toolkit, or GWT for short, recently went live with their 1.6 release, which also included a Google plugin for Eclipse and integration with App Engine's Java language support. Google I/O will be rich with GWT content, including a number of sessions on improving productivity and app performance with GWT. In addition, there will be a number of external GWT developers leading some of these sessions and/or part of the Developer Sandbox.
As mentioned last week, we're giving you a closer look at developers who'll be presenting or demoing at I/O. Here is a taste of these GWT developers below. (New to GWT? Check out this overview)
JBoss, a Division of Red Hat JBoss is well-known by developers for their enterprise open source middleware. Red Hat developer communities such as the Fedora Project and jboss.org have collaborated with Google on a number of developer initiatives over the years including Google Summer of Code, Hibernate Shards, integration with Drools and the Seam Framework and Google Gadgets integration with JBoss Portal. JBoss will be present at the Developer Sandbox.
Timefire Timefire produces highly scalable, interactive visualizations of up to millions of data points for business intelligence, analytics, finance, sensor networks, and other industries in what they like to call "Google Maps, but for the time dimension." Their platform's built on Google Web Toolkit from the ground up, but also runs natively on Android. Timefire also uses App Engine's new Java language support for their social charting tool, Gadgets, OpenSocial, GData, Google Maps, GViz, YouTube Player API, and Protocol Buffers. Ray Cromwell will be at the Developer Sandbox as well as speaking on 2 sessions - Building Applications on the Google OpenStack and Progressively Enhance AJAX Applications with Google Web Toolkit and GQuery
StudyBlue StudyBlue is an academic network which enables students to connect with each other and offers study tools. StudyBlue's website is built entirely with GWT. According to StudyBlue, GWT allows for complete AJAX integration without sacrificing usability or integration capabilities. StudyBlue will be at the Sandbox.
Lombardi Blueprint Lombardi Blueprint is a cloud-based process discovery and documentation platform accessible from any browser. They've used GWT since early 2007 to write the client side of Lombardi Blueprint. GWT has enabled Lombardi to focus on writing and maintaining their Java code, while taking care of creating the browser-specific optimized AJAX for them. Alex Moffat and Damon Lundin will be at the Developer Sandbox as well as leading a session, Effective GWT: Developing a complex, high-performance app with Google Web Toolkit. (Check out Alex Moffat's video about Lombardi's use of GWT)
Finally, one little known fact - a number of Google products were developed with the help of GWT. This includes Google Moderator, Health, Checkout, Image Labeler, and Base.
Don't forget - early registration for Google I/O ends May 1. This means $100 off the standard list price (and a copy of the Chrome comic book). To register, check out the latest sessions, or see more developers who'll be presenting at I/O, visit code.google.com/io.