By Marcus Boerger, Software Engineer, Chart API team

Many of the features you've requested via Google Chart API forum are now live in the Google Chart API:

• Easily create Sparklines (&cht=ls) without having to manipulate other kinds of graphs.

  

• Support for Radar charts (&cht=r or &cht=rs) to display data in a polar coordinate system.

  

• A new Map chart type (&cht=t) which makes it easy to colour countries and regions according to your data.

  
  

Some other changes we've made:

• Added scaling for text encoded data
• Added support for negative numbers on bar charts
• Added ability to draw data lines on bar charts

You can read more about all of this -- plus the fact that we've lifted the 50,000 queries per day limit -- on the Chart API site. And special thanks to our Technical Writer Lesley Burr, who put together this documentation in her 20% time.

By Nir Bar-Lev, Product Manager

We spend a fair amount of time on data display and visualization projects at Google, and we have found that the "last mile" of these projects tend to become full projects in and of themselves.

Thus when we acquired Gapminder last year, we were excited by the opportunity to use Gapminder's powerful visualization techniques to bring new life and usefulness to Google datasets. And we were not alone -- the web is home to a vibrant community of developers who build amazing visualization applications.

With the community in mind, we're please to introduce the Google Visualization API, which is designed to make it easier for a wide audience to make use of advanced visualization technology, and do so in a way that makes it quick and easy to integrate with new visualizations.

There are a two key elements here: simplicity and ubiquity. We hope we nailed the first, but of course we want to hear your feedback on that. The second will take more time, but we hope we're on the right path. We're releasing this API at an early stage so we can get continuous feedback and be sure we're building it the right way.

This launch is in tandem and in cooperation with the Google Docs team, who just announced support for gadgets and the Visualization API in spreadsheets. This includes a set of gadgets created by Google and several other companies, including some that add pivoting, grouping, and other new functionality to your spreadsheets. You can see all of those in our 'featured' list within the visualization gallery, which includes the Gapminder Motion Chart that has proven especially popular among within Google.

We hope you're as excited about the Google Visualization API as we are -- please be sure to tell us what you think. We'll also be at Google I/O on May 28-29 for deeper discussions about the API or visualization techniques in general.

By Noel Gorelick, Software Engineer

Last summer we launched a site aimed to help educators and students alike become more familiar with the technology behind Google and the massive internet in general. Recently, we've redesigned that site and given it a fresh name: welcome Google Code University.

Google Code University is a growing repository of computer science educational material including tutorials, lecture slides, and videos. Since the initial launch last summer, we've added a lot of new content -- for example, a few months ago we blogged about course material that the University of Washington developed with us on large-scale distributed computing. Recently, we've added tutorials on MySQL and Subversion. And there's a new series of lectures from an introductory web programming class taught at the University of Washington. The site's still growing, and we'll keep adding more content in the coming months.

Most importantly, most of the course materials are Creative Commons licensed, so we encourage educators and students to reuse and build upon them. If you have questions, comments, or materials you'd like to share, please visit the forum. We'd love to hear your feedback and have you contribute to the site.

By Sebastian Wilhelmi, Google Chart API SRE

We got a lot of feedback after releasing the Google Chart API in early December. By far the most questions were about the limit of 50,000 queries per user per day. Some of you who are webmasters of larger sites are afraid of overstepping this limit. We've heard your concerns, and have decided to drop that limit altogether.

However, should you expect to regularly cause more than 250,000 queries per day to the Google Chart API, we'd like you to let us know by mailing chart-api-notifications@google.com so that we can plan for the demand.

And with that said, from now on, if your site can't handle the Slashdot effect, it shouldn't be because of the Google Chart API. ;)

But why did we impose a query limit to start with? It was there to ensure that we could provide a reliable service for all legitimate users because we were able to lock out malicious users.

We work hard to provide reliable services, and even have a specific team of site reliability engineers (SRE) dedicated to keeping our services up and running (as well as fast). I cover the Chart API for SRE. A very important part of an SRE's work is capacity planning, because only a service with sufficient capacity can serve reliably and with low latency. For a new service, planning the capacity is naturally very hard, because there are a lot of unknown contributing variables. That's why we started with a quite conservative query limit. Now, that we've had the public API running for some time, we've collected enough experience to feel comfortable raising that limit without jeopardizing the service's reliability.

By the way, there's a lot more to what an SRE does. We also run, debug, optimize and troubleshoot very large scale distributed systems. If you're interested, come join Google SRE -- for instance the Zürich SRE team, where I work.

By Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team

As promised in my last post announcing the new YouTube developer offerings, we're hosting a hackathon for the YouTube and Picasa Web Albums APIs at the Googleplex on March 27th, 2008.

We'll give overviews of both APIs, go over new features, and run some codelabs to get you started. If you're already familiar with both the APIs, stop by to meet the teams, ask questions, and find other developers to work on projects with.

There will be two sessions -- one from 3PM - 6:30PM and another from 6:30PM - 10PM. Feel free to stay the whole day, or just come for the session you have time for. Don't worry about food and caffeine -- we've got you covered.

Interested? Please RSVP and let us know.

Hope to see you there!

By Jacob Moon, Google Developer Programs

If you're a frequent visitor to code.google.com for product updates and reference materials for Google APIs you're working with, you might have noticed that the page loading time (or page rendering time depending on how you see it) has reduced in varying degrees in the past several weeks.

As you'll see below, we've made several changes to help reduce user-perceived latency. This is not an exhaustive list of all improvements we've made recently, but these are the major ones we've made.

As Steve Souders emphasizes as the "Performance Golden Rule" in his book High Performance Web Sites, "only 10-20% of the end user response time is spent downloading the HTML document. The other 80-90% is spent downloading all the components in the page (p.5)".

We agree. That's why we focused our effort on reducing the number and size of downloads (HTTP requests) for the "components" throughout Google Code.

• Combined and minimized JavaScript and CSS files used throughout the site

• Implemented CSS sprites for frequently-used images

We had to change it to:

• Implemented lazy loading of Google AJAX APIs loader module (google.load)
  

   <script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>

if (needToLoadGoogleAjaxApisLoaderModule) {

    // Load Google AJAX APIs loader module (google.load)

    var script = document.createElement('script');

    script.src = 'http://www.google.com/jsapi?callback=googleLoadCallback';

    script.type = 'text/javascript';

    document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(script);

}

By now you're probably wondering just how much of an impact did these changes have on Google Code anyways? According to our latency measurement stats, the user-perceived latency on Google Code dropped quite a bit, anywhere between 30% and 70% depending on the page. This is a huge return for relatively small investments we've made along the way, and we hope you'll find these techniques useful for your own web development as well.

By Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team

Ever wanted to get in on the online video craze? Now's a good time! We've just added upload, write, and authentication functionality to the YouTube Data API. Brand new player APIs and tools are also now available.

That means that if, for example, you run a site just for iguana enthusiasts, your users can upload videos of JubJub to their YouTube accounts, post comments, create iguana playlists, and more, all without leaving your site. And with the new player APIs and the new chromeless player, you can completely customize and skin the YouTube embedded player to match the look and feel of your site (a green theme, buttons that look like scales?).

So excited that you can't decide what to do next? Read more details over at the YouTube API blog, watch our engineers talk about the new features (on YouTube, where else?), check out the docs, then join the forum.

You can also mark your calendars -- we'll be holding a YouTube / Picasa hackathon on March 27th at the Googleplex in Mountain View. Stay tuned for more info.

By Andrew Bowers, Google Developer Programs


Its been about a year since I last blogged about a big Google developer event. During that time, we’ve seen a number of new technologies emerge which developers can use to build killer web applications. OpenSocial, Gears, and Android are a few that come to mind. But there is also a lot to learn if you really want to get the most out of these products.

That’s why I’m excited to announce Google I/O, 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.

We've divided Google I/O into five topic areas: AJAX, APIs & Tools, Social, Geo, and Mobile. There's, of course, a focus on Google products, but the event won’t be limited to just Google APIs and developer tools. There is a lot of knowledge about web development in general at Google, and we’d like to share that expertise so that all applications on the web get better.

Over the two days, Google engineers and other leading software developers will share their knowledge in breakout sessions, hands-on Code Labs, and Q&A Fireside Chats.  Just a few of those speakers and what they'll be covering:

• David Glazer, Director of Engineering - OpenSocial
• Mark Lucovsky, Director of Engineering - AJAX APIs
  
• Brad Fitzpatrick, Software Engineer - Social Graph API
  
• Dion Almaer, Technical Program Manager and co-founder of AJAXian.com - AJAX
  
• John Panzer, Technical Manager - Shindig
  
• Guido Van Rossum, Software Engineer and creator of Python - Python and Google APIs
  
• Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager - Open Source
• Bruce Johnson, co-creator of Google Web Toolkit - Google Web Toolkit
  

We're doing our best to make this a can't-miss event for web app developers. Visit the Google I/O website to learn more and register.  Space is limited, so be sure to make plans to attend now.

PS. If you are wondering whether we’re still having our global Google Developer Day series, the answer is a definite yes. We’ll be rolling out Developer Days to a number of countries outside the US. Look for an announcement of dates and locations soon.

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

What a week for technology news. I feel like the industry is in overdrive this week as we have large announcements in mobile (e.g. iPhone SDK, Gears for Mobile), and we get to see a beta of IE 8 for the first time.

I was very happy to see the actual release of Google Gears for Mobile. I had just been visiting the London office where I got to chat with the team behind the mobile launch. I enjoyed hearing the story behind the birth of Gears for mobile, and their thoughts on where mobile development is heading. It seems like we hear people claiming the breakthrough of the mobile Web every year, but 2008 may finally be the right time. We are getting the combination of devices that are good enough, and better networks. The tools that Gears provides seem to almost make more sense in the mobile world, and I look forward to seeing the community build new Gears to unlock the power of the mobile devices and put that functionality into the hands of Web hackers.

Listen in to the conversation below:



The mobile release happened right as Brad Neuberg and myself were doing a mini mid-west tour of the University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign, and the University of Michigan. It was great to meet the students and see their views on the Web. Speaking on Gears at the birth of the Web browser was also a real honour.

Death to scrap-y

Whenever I see an application that asks for my Google username and password to scrape contacts I would cry. This isn't what we want users doing, but I really understand the users are asking for the functionality of mashing up their contact data, and no-one wants to re-enter it. You can't blame third party applications for offering the functionality, and now they don't have to do it insecurely. The release of the Google Contacts API offers an AtomPub based way of consuming your contacts.

Another feature that our users keep asking for is Google Calendar sync, and we just got the Outlook sync product out to you too.

There were a couple of interesting pieces of news in the Maps space. You now have access to a new static map API that gives you a snapshot image of the map instead of an embed-able interactive widget.

Pamela Fox also put together a rich Google Maps API Gallery that answers questions such as: "How do I draw a circle on the map?" or "How do I create groups of toggle-able markers?"

The open source side of Google has been busy too. The Summer of Code 2008 has launched, so start thinking of cool projects for the students to get hacking on!

We also have a group heading to PyCon 2008, so join us there as we give a talk titled: Use Google Spreadsheets API to create a database in the cloud.

Lindsey Simon created a very cool little tool, CSSJanus, that lets you take your CSS styled Web site and create a right-to-left version for locales that need it. He talked about the work behind it, gave a screencast showing it in action for you.

Finally, there are some other cool videos to check out too (it's Friday!)

• Mission: Possible - Building a Google Gadget is a fun one, showing you how to build Gadgets in a creative way
• Google IPv6 Conference 2008: What will the IPv6 Internet look like? gives you a look at the future of the internet thanks to a panel discussion
• JRuby: The power of Java and Ruby is a talk given by Ola Bini on the JRuby run time, which follows on from Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz) talking to us about Ruby 1.9.

As always, check out the latest tech talks, subscribe to the Google Developer Podcast and visit the Google Code YouTube channel.

After we take a breather from this week, see you next time!

By DeWitt Clinton, Google Developer Programs

A common contact list has helped power applications like Gmail, Google Reader, and Google Calendar. And now, with the launch of the Google Contacts Data API, we're opening up this contact list to your applications as well.

Based on AtomPub, the Contacts API can be used to safely read, create, edit, and delete contact information stored with Google, all while keeping users' passwords private via delegated authentication and authorization. Learn the details from Sebastian Kanthak in his announcement post on the Google Data APIs blog, and join the conversation on the Contacts API Group.