By Tom Stocky, Google Developer Products

We just concluded tonight's Campfire One, where we launched a preview release of Google App Engine, a way for developers to run their web applications on Google's infrastructure. We're still processing the videos from the event, which will be up shortly.

To learn more about Google App Engine, check out the documentation or read the team's announcement on the Google App Engine Blog.

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

This post is one in a series that previews Google I/O, our biggest developer event in San Francisco, May 28-29. Over the next two months, we'll be highlighting sessions and speakers to give Google Code blog readers a better sense of what's in store for you at the event. - Ed.

Ever since Ajax reemerged to create new exciting Web applications, we have seen a lot of growth in the ecosystem. Who would have thought that the universe would have expanded from richer browser applications to mobile, embedded, widgets, and desktop platforms. You can program it all with the same HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that you know and .... maybe love.

We are excited about what 2008 brings for Ajax applications, and look forward to diving into the action with our session at Google I/O.

At its core we seem to have performance in various very different forms.

Application Speed

We are seeing a lot of focus on making your applications perform well. With leaders like Steve Souders, we have seen how small tweaks to our front end engineering can leave to an improved perceived performance of our applications, which leads to a better user experience. At Google, I have seen first hand, how important latency is to applications, and I am excited to see this trend expanding to the community as a whole.

One part of the puzzle is the browser itself. With new browsers such as IE 8, Firefox 3, and Safari 3.1 come improved performance across the board. We can learn how to make the browsers optimize their downloads in parallel, JavaScript and DOM execution speed.

With some of the features in Gears, such as the Worker Pool, we have also seen significant improvements in performance as you allow the execution to happen outside of the usual browser pipeline.

Even tests like Acid3 have performance benchmarks built-in.

Productivity

Shortly after Ajax was coined, we saw a proliferation of Ajax libraries. Most started out as simple wrappers on top of XMLHttpRequest, but they have grown over time to handle cross browser issues (e.g. hide and abstract differences), with lots of work making DOM manipulation easier. The recent trend has been to move to a CSS based model, lead by jQuery, where you attach behaviour all through CSS selectors.

We have a scientific methodology to determine which library is for you, after extensive research, and just because this is Google I/O do not presume that it always returns GWT!

User Experience

The reason that Ajax took off in our minds isn't due to any magic in XHR, but because it brought a revolution to the user experience of Web sites. Suddenly you could build highly interactive applications, instead of the archaic redraw Web. Imagine a desktop application that redrew the entire application every time you caused an event (such as a mouseclick).

This is where the state of the art continues to thrive. How can we improve the user experience of Web applications? There are many popular applications that showcase new methods, and plenty of bad ones to learn from too.

Standards

HTML 5 is moving along nicely. Understanding the parts and pieces to this world is a glimpse at the future. There are many features that have you saying "at last!", and we will delve into all of these. Gears also fits into the HTML 5 picture, so we can talk to various initiatives in the standards space.

We hope to get a chance to chat with you at the conference!

By Steven Saviano, Software Engineer

This post is one in a series that previews Google I/O, our biggest developer event in San Francisco, May 28-29. Over the next two months, we'll be highlighting sessions and speakers to give Google Code blog readers a better sense of what's in store for you at the event. - Ed.

Being a UI engineer, I usually expect the features I implement to have a little bit more visual interaction than a little green icon. However, while my team and I were implementing Google Docs Offline, the challenge was just that: how make the offline experience work seamlessly while just adding one icon.



Building Docs Offline was quite a challenge, and we pushed Gears to its limits to accomplish it. To give an idea of some of the complexities, Google Docs is one application that is comprised of 3 editors (documents, spreadsheets, and presentations) and 1 file management UI running across two domains (docs.google.com and spreadsheets.google.com). The domain challenges alone were significant challenges in our design - we are fully utilizing multiple cross-domain workers to synchronize documents, capture resources, and authenticate users.

Oh yeah, and did I mention that any of the servers can be running any version of the code and fall over at anytime?

Getting all of this to "just work" for users was tough, but necessary for a great user experience.

Wondering how you can take your applications offline? I'll be discussing all these issues in-depth at this year's Google developer conference, Google I/O. Come by and learn how to get your app its very own little green syncing icon.

By Dan Peterson, Product Manager

On the heels of hi5's OpenSocial launch, this Sunday, the 6th of April, BT is hosting an OpenSocial Hackathon at BT Centre in London. This is an ideal opportunity to get started building apps with OpenSocial, or come and get a hand with an app you've already built. In addition, you'll be able to talk with engineers from Hyves, MySpace, Netlog, studiVZ, XING, and Google.

The event will kick off at 11:00am, though doors will open at 10:00am with a light breakfast. Full details are available here, or you can directly RSVP here.

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs



I had the pleasure of taking a trip back to my home land of England to meet up with the team behind the Google Gears for Mobile product.

As someone who loves Web development, it is an exciting proposition to be able to use the Web platform to be able to develop applications on the mobile.

This release enables you to use the Gears 0.3 APIs on Windows Mobile devices. With this new version, not only do you have access to the Database, LocalServer, and WorkerPool APIs, but you can also create desktop shortcuts. Considering the disconnected nature and latency issues inherent to the mobile networks, these APIs allow you to deliver more responsive applications that can hide some of the problems.

Today, we saw the release of a new mobile version of Picasa Web Albums that uses these features. I got to sit down with Joe Walnes, tech lead of the mobile Picasa team. Joe and his team built both the Gears-enabled version of Picasa for the phone as well as the iPhone version that allows you to sit on the Tube and still flip through your family photos.

Joe tells us about his experience building the Gears application.



I have also put together an audio podcast consisting of interviews with not only Joe, but other members of the Gears team.

First, I talk to Charles Wiles, the Product Manager of the Google Gears for Mobile team. He gives us a high level view of the project in general, and this launch in particular. We also discuss the native abilities of Gears on the mobile, widget platforms, and future Gears developments.

Second, we hear from two engineers on the project, Dave Burke and Andrei Popescu. They go into detail on the platform, how you architect mobile Web applications, how you develop and debug applications, new APIs such as the Location API, and how Android fits in to the picture.

Finally, we hear again from Joe Walnes.

I am really excited about the prospect of building rich mobile applications using Web based technology.

You can download the episode directly, or subscribe to the show ( click here for iTunes one-click subscribe).

By Jackie Bodine, Google Data APIs Team

The goal of the Google Data APIs is to give developers a consistent (and familiar) way to integrate with Google products. At their heart is Atom and the Atom Publishing Protocol, and we've created extensions on top of those open standards to add features like specifying a calendar schema or authentication protocol.

We've always intended for the Google Data APIs to be open and reusable, and today we've taken an extra step to make that intention clearer. We're giving a no-charge, royalty-free license to any patents we have that you would need to implement Atom, AtomPub, or any of our extensions. The official way to do this was via an intellectual property disclosure to the IETF and the patent license now linked from the Google Data APIs docs.

We hope this will encourage sites who want to expose APIs for things like photos, videos, calendar, or contacts to reuse our schemas where they can, rather than reinventing the wheel. Doing so will make it easier for developers who are integrating with multiple sites or porting over an existing app to a new site.

To learn more, check out the Google Data APIs Blog or dive into the patent license itself. Also, be sure to register for the Google I/O conference. I'll be giving a talk there about Google Data APIs, and there will be opportunities for deeper discussions and direct interaction with the engineering team.

By guest author, Michael "Van" Riper, Silicon Valley Google Technology User Group

Ever wondered how to create maps like this Primary Election Results Map, created by Michael Geary? If so, please join us in at the Googleplex (Bldg 43, main campus, room Tunis) on the evening of April 2nd. Michael will be on hand to show you how. This gathering is being co-hosted by the Google GEO Developer Series and the recently formed Silicon Valley Google Technology User Group (which is not affiliated with Google). A networking hour with food and drinks starting at 5:30pm will be followed by Michael's talk at 6:30pm. Although this is a free event open to all, we do ask that you register in advance.

During the evening, we're also inviting community members to come forward and do short (no more than 5 minutes) demos of their own Google GEO applications during the networking hour. If you would like to participate in that way, please contact me. I'll be coordinating the networking hour demos. That's all, folks.

By Michael Herf, Photos Team

If you've ever wanted to make your favorite software or website work with Google's Picasa software, there's a new Picasa Button API that lets you add your own buttons to the desktop interface.


The BlogThis! button in Picasa uses these APIs.

These buttons can send files to other applications on your PC, -- this tutorial (.zip) shows how to send files to Adobe Photoshop CS3 -- and they can also upload photos and movies to websites of your choice.

I'm most excited about our Web Uploader API. It uses a protocol we developed for posting photos to Blogger a couple years ago, and it shows a web-based preview of what you're going to upload before you send it. Using the web uploader, you can make user interfaces that feel more like sending an email and less like "Wait an hour to upload..." Picasa can also resize files before sending, saving time. There's some sample PHP code (.zip) to try out.

Also because these new buttons can be made by anyone, it means that there's no job too small for a Picasa button. You could make a button for your personal blog or for your major photo hosting service. See our demo video, which features Smugmug.

If you live near Mountain View, California, come out for Thursday's Youtube/Picasa Hackathon. We'll be showing off examples of these APIs, and answering questions to help you get started with them.

By DeWitt Clinton, Google Developer Programs

Today we are pleased to announce that Google is joining together with Yahoo! and MySpace in the creation of a non-profit foundation for the open and transparent governance of the OpenSocial specifications and intellectual property. This foundation, modeled after the community-led and industry-supported OpenID Foundation, will seek to ensure that the technology behind OpenSocial remains implementable by all, freely and without restriction, in perpetuity. The establishment of the foundation is a necessary and exciting next step toward an open model for application syndication via an increasingly socially-enabled Internet, and we invite and encourage your involvement as we complete this process over the next several months.

Additionally we are pleased to be a part of the launch of opensocial.org, the new official home for the OpenSocial specifications and developer community. While we are still in the early stages of putting the new site together, we wanted to open the site and the process immediately for community feedback and review.

So please join us, Yahoo!, MySpace, and all of the other OpenSocial containers and application providers, in extending a warm welcome to the community in a spirit of collaboration and rapid iteration, as we move forward with the establishment of the OpenSocial Foundation and look ahead to the continued growth of the social web.

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

I got to meet developers in Colorado this week. Working from the Google Boulder office with its fun climbing wall (*so* Boulder) was a treat, and there were several API announcements that were really exciting.

First of all we had the YouTube API update. The new APIs for YouTube are very broad. Not only do you have new access via AtomPub (e.g. to upload), but you can now have fantastic control of the player with a very simple JavaScript API.

In a matter of minutes I was able to create a simple HTML little language that allows me to annotate my YouTube videos with a table of contents that jump to the correct place.

To listen to the great new features, listen in below:



Then we had the rash of new AJAX APIs.

Google AJAX Language API:

The AJAX Search and Feeds team is happy to announce a new member to their API family -- the Language API. This new API boasts two functions, language translation and language detection - which cover 13 languages and 29 translation pairs.

All this with a couple of simple JavaScript calls such as this:

google.language.translate('Gato', 'es', 'en', function(result) {

  alert(result.translation);

});

Google Visualization API:

We are excited to launch the Google Visualization API, a new API designed for visualizing structured data. The API adds the ability to send queries to data sources and process the response. The first data source that already supports this API is Google Spreadsheets. We are also launching a set of visualization gadgets that use this API.

With this API, you can read data from a data source that supports the API. You can read an entire table, or you can run a query on the data source using the API's query language. The query response is an easy to process data table designed to simplify data visualization. It includes both the underlying values and the formatted values, column types, headers and more.

Staying with visualization and charting... we had a great response to the initial Google Chart API launch, and the team came back with new features allowing very cool new graph types, and lifting the limits on chart calls.

All of these APIs share the same property of doing their thing very well, and providing a simple API to the developer. I hope you will agree, and if not, let us know what you need!

In the land of Google Gears, a couple of external libraries were features. Malte Ubl provided a nice little abstraction for cross domain messaging which uses HTML 5 postMessage(), else Gears, else a browser hack to make the beast work on all browsers.

That is for Worker pools, and with the Database API we saw Aptana releasing an update to their server-side JavaScript database API allowing you to use the Gears API on the server.

Google Code itself got some love. We have improved performance on the site and Jacob Moon shared how we did so.

Then we added an interactive developer guide that allows you to try code on the fly as you go through the GData JavaScript API. It feels good to be able to massage and play as you go.

Finally, we announced Google I/O which is "a two day developer gathering on May 28th & 29th in San Francisco. The purpose of the event is to bring developers together to learn about products, tools, and techniques which are moving the web forward as a platform." If you would like to mingle and join Google engineers, and other Web luminaries as we discuss how to move the Web forward, join us!