The Roundup: An offline Shindig that is off the Charts!
By Dion
Almaer, Google Developer ProgramsI just got back from a
trip to Belgium that had me speaking at JavaPolis, a conference full of Java and Web folk from
Europe and beyond. Google engineers were all over, and we gave talks on Gears, GWT, Google
data APIs, Guice, Google Java Collections, and Java language issues. It was capped off with an
informal pub meetup where Google and Atlassian took the bill. Remember, they take pride in
that Belgian beer.
GWT was in full force at the event. Many people came
up to me to discuss their
GWT
implementations, and a lot of cool APIs and applications have been
announced recently. For example,
JSTM, the
Java Shared Transacted Memory for GWT is a promising new library that gives you a
transactional cache that can keep clients in sync. Map this onto Google Gears, and you can get
offline caching. The author of the library is taking a lot at that feature right now. We also
saw
GWT
Voices, which gives GWT developers with a cross browser sound API. Finally,
Chronoscope
showed us that you could take a GWT application, and with a small amount of work get it
running on Android. A huge benefit of using the Java programming language across the
board.
Speaking of Android, we got to have a nice long chat with
Dianne
Hackborn and Jason Parks of the Android team about many facets of the
platform.
We also got to speak to developers from Zoho, on the release
of
Zoho
Writer that uses Google Gears for full read/write access.
OpenSocial has been chugging away too, and it was exciting to see
Apache
Shindig, the open source set of components around OpenSocial, get
released. This
release includes a core gadget container foundation and an open source version of the
gmodules.com renderer.
A fun new API was released recently too, which
got a lot of buzz in the community. Out of the Zurich office, we saw the
Google
Charts API, which allows you to create dynamic charts in very short order. You can
even integrate the new API with
KML
for quick data visualization.
The open source side of Google
Code has had a busy time too. We released the
Google Mac Developer Playground, which is a
home for useful open source code produced by the Google Mac team, and any engineers at Google.
With this release, Dave MacLachlan announced
Statz which has already seen a major
upgrade, allowing you to talk to a large swath of services.
On the back
of the Google Summer of Code project, the team wanted to keep spreading open source goodness,
and announced the
Google
Highly Open Participation Contest, and have already
updated us
of its performance. It is outstanding to see so many people coming together to help
the myriad of open source communities out there.
To finish up, how
about
taking
a peak at the new Knol effort, or looking at the new
developer
community calendar, or firing off a video download in the background to watch:
As always,
check
out the latest tech talks,
subscribe to the Google Developer
Podcast and visit
the Google
Code YouTube channel.
