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.