We frequently hear that developers want to hear from peers who've built
interesting applications. That's why we're excited that this year's
Google I/O (May 27th - 28th in San
Francisco) will involve more developers from the community at large. Today, we're raising the
virtual curtain on some of the developers who'll be participating in Google I/O this
year.
These developers represent a wide range of companies and apps -
all of which are strong examples of Google developer products and open web technologies in
action. They'll be
presenting
technical sessions and demoing their apps at the
Developer Sandbox, a new
addition to Google I/O featuring demo station "pods". With so many developers at Google I/O,
this is a great opportunity for event attendees to check out their apps, ask questions,
exchange ideas, and meet new people.
Given the recent
App
Engine launch, we thought it'd be fitting to introduce a subset of the
App Engine developers who will be demoing
or presenting at Google I/O:
- 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.
To
check out speakers, visit the
speakers page. To see
who'll be demoing at the Sandbox, check out the
Developer Sandbox
page.
Keep in mind what you see currently on these pages is
still 'in progress'. Over the next few weeks, we'll be regularly updating the
I/O website with more sessions, speakers, and
Developer Sandbox demos, so keep checking back. And each week on the Code Blog, we'll give you
a closer look into who these developers are, including guest blog posts authored by them that
share their development experiences and tips. (
The
AJAX API team's gotten a headstart on this)
Finally, we can't
end a blog post about Google I/O without a (shameless) plug for actually signing up for the
event, so here it is:
<shameless plug>
Early
registration for Google I/O ends May 1, so if you're thinking of attending, now's a good time.
Sign up at
code.google.com/io. We
look forward to meeting you!
</shameless plug>
*You can also follow our tweets:
@googleio.
By Christine Tsai, Google Developer
Products
