Weekly Google Code Roundup: JavaScript and GData can now write home, Gadget Ads, presentations, and more.

SEP 21, 2007

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

We had a really fun week with launches and news across a myriad of products. From a technical perspective, it was really exciting to see the launch of a new GData JavaScript library that enables full CRUD access from the browser. No need for proxies. Jun Yang, engineer on the GData team, sat down to explain the API and how it works. People will remember when the mainstream thought it was impossible to do full read/write authenticated cross domain access in a secure way.

Jason Cooper, of the Google Mashup Editor team, took the new API that works with Google Calendar, and provided a mashup that is able to create new events in your calendar.

Speaking of JavaScript APIs, The Digg Oracle is a new Google Gears application that showcases the pattern of sucking down data, and allowing you to do local manipulations and data filtering in the client. It makes heavy use of the WorkerPool and the local database. See it in action.

The Google Maps API has also gotten some new features and news. First, a new IP based limit is coming soon, and new enhanced map tiles are available. You can also use custom map types via the Google Maps API Open Source Utility Library.

In the land of open source, Leslie showcased the summer of coders of 2007, and released a podcast on all things GCC. We also discussed our thoughts on the ISO decision on OOXML, and the Google Code for Educators program released a series of lectures on MapReduce.

The Google Gadget and AdSense universes combined for the introduction of Google Gadget Ads, which are customized "mini-sites" that run as ads on AdSense publisher websites. These ads are interactive, engaging, and will appeal to your users, simultaneously providing value to advertisers while getting visitors to stick around your site. The end result is that advertisers get more engaged users, users have a richer ad experience, and publishers opted in to image ads may see increased competition for their ad space.

When you check out your ads, you can watch what is going on via Google Analytics, and the team has created a series of videos to teach you about many advanced features.

These videos could have included a presentation, and now you can create presentations from within Google Docs itself. Now we the great collaboration experience that we have for docs and spreadsheets can be had for your presentations. Please use this power for good, and no slides with 20 bullet points!

To finish up, I can get quick access to results from two of my favourite sports. A quick cricket search gives me all of the Twenty20 scores, and iGoogle gives me the rugby world cup results.

All in all a great week! As always, check out the latest tech talks, subscribe to the Google Developer Podcast and visit the Google Code YouTube channel.