Google Developers Blog: April 2009

PPK: The Open Web Goes Mobile

Thursday, April 30, 2009

browser compatibility researchquirksmode.orgslides

top level: Android WebKit, Safari, Opera Mobile

mid level: S60 WebKit, Blackberry, Opera Mini

bottom level: NetFront, IE Mobile

W3C WidgetsBy Steve Souders, Performance Evangelist

Who's @ Google I/O - spotlight on AJAX and Google Data APIs

Thursday, April 30, 2009

AJAX APIsAJAX APIs PlaygroundGoogle Data APIsYouTubeCalendarPicasa Web AlbumsAnalyticssessions

Redfin
Redfin is an online brokerage site for buying and selling homes. Redfin uses the Google Maps, Charts, and Feeds APIs. Redfin actively talks about the behind-the-scenes development decisions, which can be found at the Redfin Developer Blog. (For example, they blogged about why they switched to the Google Maps API) Sasha Aickin, Engineering Manager, will be speaking on a session called Performance Tips for Geo API Mashups.

Lonely Planet
Lonely Planet is known by travelers for producing informed and honest travel advice. Lonely Planet uses the Google Maps Javascript API to power interactive maps on lonelyplanet.com, the Google Static Maps API on its cross-device mobile site, m.lonelyplanet.com, and OpenSocial, App Engine, and Android in products soon to be launched. Ken Hoetmer, Lonely Planet's neogeographer in residence, will be speaking on a session called Maps APIs & Mobile.

Adobe
Introduced with Adobe Creative Suite 4, Adobe Community Help utilizes Google Custom Search (a product which also supports the AJAX APIs) to aggregate the most relevant help content from the broader community. By integrating search directly within the application workflow, users can find answers to their software questions no matter where those answers may be found. Currently, Adobe is exploring ways of expanding Custom Search to include code samples directly within Adobe development environments for products like Flash and Flex. (Read Adobe's blog post about Adobe Community Help)

LuckyCal
LuckyCal is a calendaring application which utilizes several of the Google Data APIs to create a dynamic calendar experience. They authenticate using OAuth to retrieve data from the Calendar and Contacts Data APIs. Based on where you'll be, who you know and what you like, LuckyCal finds events that are relevant to you. LuckyCal has also created a Google Gadget and uses the Maps API (both for UI and for Geocoding) extensively.

Eye.fi
The Eye-Fi Card stores photos & videos like a traditional memory card, and fits in most cameras. When you turn your camera on within range of a configured Wi-Fi network, it wirelessly transfers your photos & videos to either your computer or services like YouTube, Picasa Web Albums, etc via the YouTube and Picasa Web Albums Data APIs.

Vast Rank
Vast Rank is a college ranking website that utilizes the Google Maps API in their interactive ranking map (where visitors see rankings based on what is in view on the map). With the Client Location API, Vast Rank’s personalization engine can weigh the visitor’s location into the criteria used to suggest interesting colleges to the visitor. Vast Rank creator Jon Kragh will be leading a session, Using AJAX APIs to Navigate User-Generated Content.

280 North
280 North's application, 280 Slides, enables users to easily create web-based presentations. With the AJAX Search API and Google Data APIs, 280 Slides builds in the ability to search Google for images and YouTube for videos and drag media directly into a presentation. 280 North is also the creator of Cappuccino, an open source JavaScript-based web development framework. Check out co-founder Ross Boucher's videos where he talks about 280 Slides' implementation.

code.google.com/io@googleioBy Christine Tsai, Google Developer Products

Google Location Services now in Mozilla Firefox

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Google LatitudeGoogle Toolbar with My LocationMozilla Firefox 3.5 beta 4with users' permissionW3C geolocation API<html> <head> <script type="text/javascript"> function displayLocation(loc) { var locDiv = document.getElementById("locationDiv"); locDiv.innerHTML = "lat: " + loc.coords.latitude + ", lon:" + loc.coords.longitude; } function getLocation() { navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(displayLocation); } </script> </head> <body> <a href="#" onClick="getLocation()">Click here to display location</a><br> <div id="locationDiv"></div> </body> </html>getCurrentPositionloc

By Jonathan McPhie, Google Mobile Team

Tech Talks on the Guts of Chromium

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

wikismailing listsbugscode

Darin Fisher talking about Chromium's multi-process architecture

Brett Wilson talking about the various layers of Chromium

Dimitri Glazkov talking about hacking on WebKit

Ben Goodger talking about Views (and how to write good tests for them)

Wan-Teh Chang and Eric Roman talking about Chromium's network stack (and its history)

By Jeremy Orlow, Software Engineer

Lombardi Blueprint: Client side code, server side execution with GWT

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

This post is part of the Who's @ Google I/O, a series of blog posts that give a closer look at developers who'll be speaking or demoing at Google I/O. Today's post is a guest post written by Alex Moffat, Chief Engineer - Blueprint, Lombardi SoftwareLombardiGoogle Web Toolkit (GWT for short)

GWTGWT serialization mechanismGoogle I/OBy Alex Moffat, Chief Engineer - Blueprint, Lombardi Software

Gmail for mobile HTML5 Series: Using AppCache to Launch Offline - Part 1

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

this blog

CACHE MANIFEST
jsfile1.js
jsfile2.js
styles.css
/images/image1.png
/images/image2.png

<html manifest="/sitemanifest">Google I/OsessionDeveloper SandboxReferenceshttp://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.htmlhttp://developer.apple.com/webapps/docs/documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariJSRef/DOMApplicationCache/DOMApplicationCache.htmlhttp://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/WebCore/loader/appcacheBy Andrew Grieve, Software Engineer, Google Mobile

New Chart Options for the Visualization API

Monday, April 27, 2009

Visualization APIlist of charts

Lots of customization options for the Table visualization, so you can customize it any way you want. You can even make it look as ugly as this:

The popular Motion Chart has become even more interactive and appealing, now with zoom option, bars, and an option to save and restore the chart state.

This way you can track your data over time with the default bubble view:

Or dynamically switch to a bar view when it makes sense:

Plus, we've made all of our charts and visualizations easier to share with others through the toolbar helper element that enables you to export your data in a variety of formats, or embed the visualization in another page through a simple user oriented UI:

What's NewGoogle I/Oin-depth sessionsBy Nir Bar-Lev, Google Visualization Team

Google I/O: Hurry up and register! Discounted registration ends May 1

Monday, April 27, 2009

Google I/OGoogle Chrome Comic booktechnical sessionsengineers from Google and a wide range of developers from the communityFireside Chats and Office HoursDeveloper SandboxWe've announceda few thus farGoogle I/O websiteregisterBy Azhar Hashem, Google Developer Products

Mercurial support for Project Hosting on Google Code

Friday, April 24, 2009

MercurialSubversionkinks

MercurialGitBazaarcloning and merginggreat online bookTortoise Hganalysisformconversion docsBigtableTechTalk at Google IOplan on attendingBy David Baum, Software Engineer

Calling all JavaScripters: submit your Chrome Experiments for Google I/O!

Thursday, April 23, 2009

launchedChrome ExperimentsfewofthemGoogle I/OsubmitBy Aaron Koblin, Google Creative Lab

Who's @ Google I/O - spotlight on Google Web Toolkit

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

1.6 releaseGoogle I/OsessionsDeveloper SandboxAs mentioned last weekoverview

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)

code.google.com/io@googleioBy Christine Tsai, Google Developer Products

Attention Developers: Google Analytics now has an API!

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

So what's so exciting about this API?Android applicationAnalytics from your desktop So how does it work?

Request an authentication token from your Google Account

Create a URL with the data you'd like to get back from the API

Make an HTTP request to the Export API using the authentication token and the URL you created

What are the top referral sources by conversions to my site?

What are the top browser language settings in the United States vs. the United Kingdom?

What are the top keyword refinements and destination pages being used on my internal site search?

How do I get started?GData client libraryGoogle AJAX APIs GData loaderGoogle CodeGoogle Analytics API NotifyGoogle Analytics APIs GroupBy Nick Mihailovski and the Google Analytics API Team

Toward an open web standard for 3D graphics (part 2): Introducing O3D

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

a few weeks agoKhronosO3Dsubmit suggestionsour siteour blogdiscussion groupsGoogle I/O

By Matt Papakipos, Director of Engineering and Vangelis Kokkevis, Software Engineer

Using Google App Engine to power Web APIs

Monday, April 20, 2009

First we set up a standard App Engine account giving us the standard dashboard and deployment environment. This provides the runtime environment plus a range of tools to monitor the application - all useful to track resource usage which we'll need to worry about later.

The service itself in this case is a simple wrap of wrapping App Engine's available image manipulation features which provide standard image manipulation features, but it could easily be more complex.

Next up, the functionality is wrapped in a simple RESTful interface. There are multiple ways to do this, libraries such as the App Engine Rest Server and the Django rest interface or a port of the Ning-like REST interface can be used to do most of the heavy lifting. Gae-Rest for example includes indexes and memcache and other features to optimise response times on the API. These give the API standard GET, POST, PUT, DELETE operations we'll need to push images in and out of the application.

Finally, while we have the service ready to roll we still need a way for developers to access the service, manage their resource usage and track activity on the API. To do this we can use 3scale's API management platform which provides these features out of the box. Connection works using a standard python plugin and the system creates a configurable management portal for the service which handles signup keys, usage limits, traffic analysis and the documentation needed to support developers using the new API. For heavy users we can also add paid plans to cover any App Engine costs or make a small profit - check out the appspotimage portal here:

herelonger tutorial on how we built itGoogle I/ODeveloper SandboxGuest Post by Steven Willmott of 3scale

Google Code: Now in seven languages (plus English!)

Monday, April 20, 2009

Simplified Chinese (中文[简体])Japanese (日本語)Portuguese (Português)Russian (Pусский)Spanish (Español)Korean (한국어)Traditional Chinese (中文[繁體])OpenSocial APIGadgets APIThemes APIAdwords APIAPAC Developer BlogBy Naomi Bilodeau, Google Code Team

Wearing our Developers' Shoes

Friday, April 17, 2009

CaptionTubeTestTubepostDataPlayerGoogle App EnginePython APIsDjangojQueryapp-engine-patchGoogle I/OBy John Skidgel, App Engine Team

Who's @ Google I/O

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Google I/Opresenting technical sessionsDeveloper SandboxApp Engine launchApp Engine

Salesforce.com
Force.com is the enterprise cloud computing platform offered by Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com is committed to letting developers take advantage of the web as the ultimate platform. Force.com developer evangelist Ron Hess will lead a session outlining how to connect the Force.com SOAP Web Services API to Google App Engine for Java. The project includes an open source Web Service Client that has been completely ported to App Engine. The session will discuss the porting effort, how to use URLFetch to achieve cross- cloud communication and demonstrate a sample integration between App Engine and the Force.com SOAP API.

ThoughtWorks and SpringSource
Guillaume Laforge is the official Groovy Project Manager for SpringSource, and the spec lead of JSR-241, the Java Specification Request that standardizes the Groovy dynamic language. Ola Bini of ThoughtWorks is the creator of the language Ioke and has been one of the core developers for JRuby since 2006. Guillaume and Ola will be speaking about running Groovy (and Grails) and JRuby on top of Google App Engine for Java, respectively.

Walk Score (a project of Front Seat)
Walk Score uses App Engine for the Walk Score API that serves Walk Score data to millions of real estate listings daily. The Walk Score website also uses Google Local Search for their scoring algorithm and Google Maps API for displaying walkability of addresses and heat map views of neighborhoods and cities. The three developers behind Walk Score will be leading a session, AppEngine Nitty-Gritty: Scalability, Fault Tolerance, and Integrating Amazon EC2, outlining their experiences scaling on App Engine and combining App Engine with external services including EC2. They'll also be on hand at the Developer Sandbox.

Best Buy
Giftag, Best Buy's browser add-on for clipping, saving, and sharing web page snippets, launched on App Engine just before Black Friday last year. Using the hProduct open standard and App Engine's datastore API, Giftag enables users to add items to one or more wishlists, then share these via the App Engine-hosted front-end or Facebook. The engineers behind Giftag will be at the Developer Sandbox. (Check out their blog post and video where the team talks about migrating to App Engine)

BuddyPoke
BuddyPoke uses App Engine for fluid and cost effective scalability to handle a rapidly growing user base of over 36 million OpenSocial users. Dave Westwood, founder of BuddyPoke, will be part of the Developer Sandbox. (Check out Dave's video talking about scaling on App Engine)

3scale networks
3scale provides a Python plug-in that integrates seamlessly to App Engine so that developers can put all their resources into their API's core functionalities. User management, access control, billing and payments can be easily externalized with 3scale for those APIs that run on top of App Engine. The 3scale team will be part of the Developer Sandbox.

speakers pageDeveloper Sandbox pageI/O websiteThe AJAX API team's gotten a headstart on thiscode.google.com/io@googleioBy Christine Tsai, Google Developer Products

ThoughtWorks' Paul Hammant talks about App Engine for Java

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

excitingannouncementscron supportGoogle Secure Data Connectordatabase importGoogle-Web-ToolkitGoogle App Engine for JavaGoogle Plugin for EclipseDeveloper ProfilesPaul HammantThoughtWorksblog

hear about itBy Fred Sauer, Google Developer ProgramsJava is a trademark or registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

Google Developer Day returns to Yokohama, Japan: Registration now open

Monday, April 13, 2009

registrationYokohama, JapanAndroidGoogle ChromeApp EngineAJAX APIsMapsChinajoin usBy Alyssa Sachs, Google Developer Programs

Google Narratives Series: Chirag Mehta

Friday, April 10, 2009

Google AJAX Search APIChirag Mehta.Chime.TVSched.orgQ: Tell me about how you used Google AJAX Search API for Wiki Search and Drop Search and how you came up with the ideas.

A: My wife's currently in medical school and constantly doing searches online for medical terms. Wikipedia offered tons of information but she found their search feature to be insufficient for her needs. 90% of the time, you have no idea what you're searching for or guessing at it - it doesn't do anything to help you out. I wanted to help my wife have a faster, more dynamic experience so I brainstormed how to build a XML-type of search feature, similar to Google Search Suggest, while you were on Wikipedia. (It also helped that I'd always found Wikipedia interesting and researched databases that used it as a source of information.) That also led me to start looking at implementation options and of them all, AJAX Search seemed the easiest to integrate in a quick manner. Instead of taking two weeks to research documentation and then implement with other APIs, it took about an hour with Google AJAX Search. Also, I had worked with many Google APIs on other projects before, but the Google AJAX API was the best. The speed was amazing!

The idea for creating Drop Search came soon after fiddling with more Google AJAX search documentation. My implementation gives the everyday person without a programming background the ability to add a customized search engine to any site. It's code that you can copy and paste into your application and customize for your own needs using CSS, which I did for my own blog. A friend of mine at Rutgers University saw what I did and wanted the same type of feature for their professional development site so I released the code that I created to everyone on my projects page.

Q: Describe any obstacles you had with implementation.

A: There were none. Actually I had a couple of questions at first but I looked at the forums and got the answer fairly quickly. They were around legal issues - Am I allowed to query as I type? Is it legal that I'm doing this with Wiki search? I wish legal terms were much clearer on Google Code. I had some assumptions, only to find out they were recommendations rather than requirements. I do have to say that the documentation on Google Code is perfect. One minute you're reading documentation, the next you're in the forums reading about other developers' experiences. Help pages are broken down into every bit so it makes coding a cakewalk. It's a really good experience compared to other sites.

Q: Can you provide any tips for other developers using Google AJAX Search API?

A: Before you try to build something, find out if Google already has. Google will build 98% of your needs on the back end, leaving you 2% of the work to focus on making your user interface exactly what you need for the front end. Also, another tip... listen to your wife's complaints.online submission formGoogle I/OBy Christine Songco, Google Code Team

Deprecation policies posted for 5 more APIs

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Google Code Labsintroduced Labs

App Engine terms

Checkout API terms

Documents List Data API terms

SketchUp Ruby API terms

YouTube APIs terms

By Neel Kshetramade, Google Developer Programs

eBay's Farhang Kassaei announces "Selling Manager" as an OpenSocial gadget implementation

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Selling Manager (beta)OpenSocialApache Shindig

By Neel Kshetramade, Google Developer Programs

Standards-based Persistence For Java™ Apps On Google App Engine

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

my last post on this blogunveiled an early look at Java support for Google App EngineJDOJPABigtableDataNucleushttp://code.google.com/p/datanucleus-appengineBy Max Ross, Software Engineer

New features for App Engine announced at Campfire One

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

App EngineCampfire OneGoogle Web ToolkitGoogle Plugin for Eclipsecron supportdata import supportsecure access to data behind the firewallApp Engine Blog

Google I/OBy Andrew Bowers, Google Developer Team

HTML5 and WebKit pave the way for mobile web applications

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

excellent productEnter HTML5. GmailCalendarsearchgmail.comGoogle I/OsessionsBy Alex Nicolaou, Engineering Manager, Google Mobile

Google Developer Days 2009: the first three locations

Monday, April 6, 2009

Google Developer Days 2009

Beijing, China (June 5)

Tokyo, Japan (June 9) -- more information coming soon

Sao Paulo, Brazil (June 29) -- more information coming soon

Google I/O

AndroidChromeAjax APIsGWTApp Enginedetailed informationBy Alyssa Sachs, Google Developer Programs

AJAX APIs Playground Ver. 2

Monday, April 6, 2009

AJAX APIs Playground* Break points (simulated in Javascript)
* Firebug Lite in output for debugging
* Line numbers in code editor
* Ability to edit HTML of samples

The breakpoints and Firebug Lite additions are my favorite new features. But why did I include Firebug Lite when all web developers (should!) have Firebug installed? Because when code runs on the Playground, it runs in an iFrame. That iFrame does not have the Firebug object initialized in it. Since it is a cross-domain iFrame, there's no simple way to add Firebug to the iFrame's window object, so adding Firebug Lite was the best approach. This makes it so you can now use all of your favorite Firebug debugging convenience functions in the Playground!

To use Firebug Lite and breakpoints, simply click on the line number you want to add a breakpoint to and hit "Debug Code". This will insert Firebug Lite into the output and pause the execution on the breakpoint line number until you to click the play button to continue. Try adding a breakpoint to a line, clicking "Debug Code", then opening Firebug Lite and typing in a variable name to inspect the contents/value of the variable at that point in the code.

Adding breakpoints and forcing Firebug into a local function context were really fun engineering problems, so if you want to check them out (or contribute code to the Playground) go to the open source repository for it, come chat it up on IRC, or talk with me in person at the quickly approaching Google I/O conference (early bird registration runs until May 1).

Also, it's really important that you share your feedback so that I know what you'd like to see in the next version of the Playground! Thanks, and enjoy the Playground!

By Ben Lisbakken, Google Developer Programs

Blog

PPK: The Open Web Goes Mobile

Who's @ Google I/O - spotlight on AJAX and Google Data APIs

Google Location Services now in Mozilla Firefox

Tech Talks on the Guts of Chromium

Lombardi Blueprint: Client side code, server side execution with GWT

Gmail for mobile HTML5 Series: Using AppCache to Launch Offline - Part 1

New Chart Options for the Visualization API

Google I/O: Hurry up and register! Discounted registration ends May 1

Mercurial support for Project Hosting on Google Code

Calling all JavaScripters: submit your Chrome Experiments for Google I/O!

Who's @ Google I/O - spotlight on Google Web Toolkit

Attention Developers: Google Analytics now has an API!

Toward an open web standard for 3D graphics (part 2): Introducing O3D

Using Google App Engine to power Web APIs

Google Code: Now in seven languages (plus English!)

Wearing our Developers' Shoes

Who's @ Google I/O

ThoughtWorks' Paul Hammant talks about App Engine for Java

Google Developer Day returns to Yokohama, Japan: Registration now open

Google Narratives Series: Chirag Mehta

Deprecation policies posted for 5 more APIs

eBay's Farhang Kassaei announces "Selling Manager" as an OpenSocial gadget implementation

Standards-based Persistence For Java™ Apps On Google App Engine

New features for App Engine announced at Campfire One

HTML5 and WebKit pave the way for mobile web applications

Google Developer Days 2009: the first three locations

AJAX APIs Playground Ver. 2

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