We are pleased to announce our newest addition to the shopping family -- a simple yet powerful programmatic interface that enables retailers to upload their content to Google and query data from Google. The new Shopping APIs have two components: Content and Search. As part of this launch, we’re are also deprecating the Base API and replacing it with today’s new Shopping APIs.
The Content API for Shopping allows retailers to upload product data to Google for use in multiple places online like Google Product Search, Product Ads, Google Affiliate Network, Google Commerce Search, and Shopping Rich Snippets.
The Search API for Shopping makes it easy for our Google Commerce Search customers, Google Affiliate Network publishers, and developers to build innovative applications using product data.
The Shopping APIs replace the Base APIThese new Shopping APIs replace the existing Google Base Data API for our content providers and search applications. We are deprecating the Base API and will fully retire it on June 1, 2011. For existing developers making the switch, we’ve provided a Migration Guide to help.
You can read more details about these announcements on the Google Merchant Center blog and our FAQ on Google Base Data API Deprecation.
Today we announced a fun 20% robotics project that resulted in three ways you can play with your iRobot Create®, LEGO® MINDSTORMS®, or VEX Pro® through the cloud. We did this by enhancing App Inventor for Android, contributing to the open source Cellbots Java app, and beefing up the Cellbots Python libraries. Together these apps provide new connectivity between robots, Android, the cloud, and your browser.
You can start empowering your Android phone with robot mobility by picking the solution below that matches your skill level and programming style:
We hope this gives developers, hobbyists, and students a head start in connecting the next generation of cloud apps to the world of robotics. Be sure to push your mobile phone’s processor to its limits and share the results with the Cellbots Google Group. Try using Willow Garage’s OpenCV for Android or the new Gingerbread APIs for gyroscopes, enhanced OpenGL graphics, and multiple cameras!
(Cross-posted from the Chromium Blog)
We’re happy to announce that WebGL is now on by default in Google Chrome’s beta channel, with some shiny new demos to show off what the technology can do.
WebGL is a 3D graphics API for JavaScript that developers can use to create fully 3D web apps. It is based on the OpenGL ES 2.0 API, which should be familiar to many 3D graphics developers. Google, Mozilla, Apple, Opera and graphics hardware vendors have been working together to standardize WebGL for over a year now, and since the spec is just about final at this point, we wanted to get our implementation out there for feedback.
While you may not find much WebGL content on the web, we expect developers to quickly create a lot of content given the power and familiarity of the API. To inspire developers and give users a taste of the kind of apps they can expect in the near future, we’ve worked with a few talented teams to build a few more 3D web apps:
Body Browser, a human anatomy explorer built by a team at Google as a 20% project
Nine Point Five, a 3D earthquake map by Dean McNamee
Music Visualizer, a jukebox that synchronizes 3D graphics to the beat of the music by Jacob Seidelin
You can find these and other demos in the new Chrome Experiments Gallery for WebGL demos. Now that WebGL is enabled in the beta channel, the Chrome Experiments team is looking for your cool WebGL app submissions to show off this slick technology, so don’t forget to submit your cool 3D apps!
When Google acquired Instantiations in August 2010, everyone knew about our Java Eclipse products. Shortly after we joined, we talked about how best to help developers now that we are part of Google. We have always wanted to get these tools in more developers’ hands. So, back in September we decided to give them away for free! The community response has been fantastic. With that done, we asked ourselves, how could we make a good thing even better? How about by open sourcing the code and creating two new Eclipse projects!
Today we are announcing Google’s donation of the source code and IP for two of these products to the open source community through the Eclipse Foundation. This donation includes WindowBuilder, the leading Eclipse Java GUI Designer, and CodePro Profiler, which identifies Java code performance issues. Specifically, the WindowBuilder Engine and designers for SWT and Swing. All in all, this is a value of more than $5 million dollars worth of code and IP.
The Eclipse Foundation’s Executive Director, Mike Milinkovich, states that, “this is clearly a significant new project announcement, and very good news for Java developers using Eclipse. It has been impressive to see the continued growth and popularity of WindowBuilder, as this product has always filled a much needed gap in the Eclipse offerings. We look forward to it appearing in an Eclipse release soon. We’re very pleased with Google’s generous support of Eclipse, and the Java developer community around the world.”
One of the exciting aspects of innovating in the open source arena is that customers benefit from a full community. We are very excited to see the diverse collection of companies and individuals that have already expressed an interest in contributing to these projects. Commercial level support is important to many customers. Genuitec, makers of MyEclipse, intends to offer commercial support for the various WindowBuilder based products including the SWT, Swing Designer and even the GWT Designer from Google. Please sign up on the Genuitec site for more information. Similarly, OnPositive intends to offer commercial support for CodePro Profiler, as well as lead as the committers on the Eclipse Community Project. Sign up on the OnPositive site for more information.
"Genuitec is pleased to offer commercial support for WindowBuilder-based products - Swing, SWT and GWT - in early 2011 for companies who wish to continue a paid support contract once their Google support expires. We've been involved with the Eclipse Foundation since the beginning, so we are very familiar with these products. Thus, providing commercial support for this product line is a natural fit for us," said Maher Masri, President of Genuitec.
“Over the years OnPositive has built up unique experience with the CodePro Profiler and we are excited to offer commercial support for it. Google’s donation ensures that Java developers can build faster applications,” said Pavel Petrochenko, President of OnPositive.
WindowBuilderWindowBuilder is regarded as the leading GUI builder in the Java community (winning the award for Best Commercial Eclipse Tool in 2009). It includes powerful functionality for creating user interfaces based on the popular Swing, SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit), GWT (Google Web Toolkit), RCP and XWT UI frameworks.
CodePro ProfilerCodePro Profiler is an Eclipse-based Java application profiling tool that helps developers identify performance issues early in the development cycle and find CPU and algorithmic bottlenecks, memory leaks, threading issues, and other concurrency-related problems that can slow down an application or cause it to hang.
Both WindowBuilder and CodePro Profiler will become Eclipse projects in the first half of 2011. Once each one is set up as a project and available for download from the Eclipse site, the products will be accessible to use as open source code under the the standard Eclipse license. I am looking forward to leading the WindowBuilder project.
If you have any questions, you can learn more at this FAQ or we look forward to hearing from you on the forums.
You’ve already been able to simply include a photo in a Google Buzz post using the Buzz API. Today we’re making it much easier to add photos to Buzz posts. Additionally, using Picasa as the photo repository, you’ll now be able to wield the Buzz API to take all sorts of other actions on behalf of the user:
Accessing a photo entry through the Buzz API is just as easy as getting an activity. The form for retrieving an activity is:
https://www.googleapis.com/buzz/v1/activities/{userId}/@self/{activityId}
With just a few alterations, we get the form for retrieving a photo:
https://www.googleapis.com/buzz/v1/photos/{userId}/@self/{albumId}/@photos/{photoId}
With live data, it would look like the following URL:
https://www.googleapis.com/buzz/v1/photos/farago/@self/5251364904403459921/@photos/5251366163678993586?alt=json&prettyprint=true
Browse to that address and you’ll get data that will point to this Picasa photo:
The read-only endpoints will return public data without authentication. For authenticated access to the photos endpoints, you must be granted an OAuth token for the user with both the Buzz and Photos API scopes. For existing users, you will need to discard the OAuth tokens scoped to the Buzz API and request authorization to both scopes. More details can be found on the Google Buzz API documentation site.
Photos are an essential part of social applications. We expect these new capabilities will allow you to enrich your user’s experience with a minimum of fuss. As always, please swing by the Developer Forum to let us know what you think. And if you haven’t already, start using the APIs console to track your API usage and other coolness.
