Google Data » Zach

Google APIs at I/O 2010

Zach — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 18:19:00 +0000

Which three letters could you hear proudly proclaimed again and again throughout the sessions of Google I/O 2010? ...that’s right, A-P-I! Google APIs form the foundation of many of our developer products, and across the board, APIs made a significant impact at Google I/O.

This year, I/O saw the launch of a number of new APIs -- including the read-write Google Buzz API, the Google Font API, version two of the Google Feed API (with push!), the Google BigQuery API, the Google Latitude API, the Google Moderator API, and the Google Prediction API. Additionally, many of the sessions this year focused on how to better use existing Google APIs like the Google Analytics APIs and the YouTube APIs. And of course, we discussed many great topics during Office Hours and Fireside Chats, and after each session -- a big thank you to everyone who attended!

If you missed any of this excitement, today we’re pleased to announce that the following videos for the official Google API track are now available:

Bringing Google to your site - Google’s DeWitt Clinton and Jeff Scudder discuss a number of ways to integrate Google products with a site, including the Google Custom Search Engine, the Feed API with push, the Google Checkout Element, AdSense, Buzz Buttons, and more. DeWitt and Jeff also show how to “make the web beautiful” by announcing the new Google Font API.

Knowledge is (less) power: Exploring the Google PowerMeter API - Google’s Srikanth Rajagopalan and Rus Heywood discuss the concept behind, design of, and how to use the Google PowerMeter API.

Google Chart Tools: Google's new unified approach for creating dynamic charts on the web - Google’s Michael Fink and Amit Weinstein announce several new charts and features and expose the new look of the Google Chart Tools gallery. They also present the relative advantages of the Interactive Chart API (based on JavaScript) vs. the Image Charts API (based on server-side rendering), and show how they can work together to augment the users’ experience.

Google Analytics APIs: End to end - Google's Nick Mikhaelovski delivers an unprecedented sneak peak at how Google Analytics processes and calculates the data in reports. He also discusses the vision for Google Analytics integration tools and takes a look at how to integrate web analytics data with business data using the Google Analytics Platform.

Building real-time web apps with App Engine and the Feed API - Google’s Brett Bavar and Moishe Lettvin introduce two new tools to power the real-time web: the App Engine Channel API and the Feed API v2 with push updates. In a technical deep dive, they discuss how the Channel API pushes data from App Engine to a browser and how the new version of the Feed API subscribes to PubSubHubbub feeds and receive updates pushed to the browser.

YouTube API uploads: Tools, tips, and best practices - Google’s Jeffrey Posnick, Gareth McSorley, and Kuan Yong start off by discussing Android and iPhone upload best practices and how to resume interrupted uploads. They conclude by demonstrating the YouTube Direct embeddable iframe for soliciting uploads on existing web pages.

How Google builds APIs - Google’s Zach Maier and Mark Stahl discuss the foundations of Google’s API infrastructure, as well as a collection of different issues that shaped how APIs exist today. In addition, Google’s Yaniv Inbar demonstrates the new Java client library for Google APIs on Android, and Google’s Joey Schorr offers a sneak peak at Google’s internal API-building tool.

Analyzing and monetizing your Android & iPhone apps - Google’s Chrix Finne and Jim Kelm discuss how to build, launch, grow, monetize, and manage your Android app using AdSense for Mobile Apps. In a quick demo, Jim shows how to quicky implement Analytics in a mobile application.

We hope that you enjoy watching (or re-watching) these sessions as much as we enjoyed preparing and presenting them. Videos and slides for all of the individual presentations can be found on the pages linked above, but if you’d prefer to embark on an API-watching marathon, you should check out our YouTube playlist and watch away.

As always, it’s exciting to see the great and powerful products that you’re building with Google’s suite of APIs. We look forward to coding and innovating with you over the next year, and can’t wait to see you at I/O 2011!

By Zach Maier, Google API Infrastructure Team

Apps Script Hackathon in NYC

Zach — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 17:00:00 +0000

If you want to learn more about Google Apps Script and meet the Apps Script team, here’s your chance! We will be holding an Apps Script hackathon in New York on Thursday, June 24 from 2pm-8pm.

After we cover the basics of Apps Script, you can code along with us as we build a complete script, or you can bring your own ideas and get some help and guidance from from the team. There will be food, power, and Apps Script experts available to help throughout the day. Just bring your laptop, ideas, enthusiasm, and basic knowledge of JavaScript. Check out out the details of the event and be sure to RSVP to let us know you’re coming!

By Jan Kleinert, Google Developer Programs

Chrome Extensions for Web Development

Zach — Thu, 27 May 2010 17:00:00 +0000

The Chrome Developer Tools are great for debugging HTML, JavaScript and CSS in Chrome. If you're writing a webpage or even a web app for the Chrome Web Store, you can inspect elements in the DOM, debug live JavaScript, and edit CSS styles directly in the current page. Extensions can make Google Chrome an even better web development environment by providing additional features that you can easily access in your browser. To help developers like you, we created a page that features extensions for web development. We hope you’ll find them useful in creating applications and sites for the web.

For example, Speed Tracer is an extension to help you identify and fix performance issues in your web applications. With Speed Tracer, you can get a better idea of where time is being spent in your application and troubleshoot problems in JavaScript parsing and execution, CSS style, and more.

Another useful extension is the Resolution Test that changes the size of the browser window, so web developers can preview websites in different screen resolutions. It also includes a list of commonly used resolutions, as well as a custom option to input your own resolution.

With the Web Developer extension, you can access additional developer tools such as validation options, page resizing and a CSS elements viewer; all from an additional button in the toolbar.

Another extension you should check out is the Chrome Editor that allows you to easily code within your browser, so you don’t have to flip between your browser and code editor. You can also save a code reference locally to your computer for later use.

These are just a few of the extensions you can find in our extensions for web development page. You can also look for more in the extensions gallery.

By Koh Kim, Google Chrome Team

Announcing the orkut Java Client Library

Zach — Tue, 25 May 2010 20:50:00 +0000

Today, we’re pleased to announce our new orkut Java client library!

If you’ve ever wanted to write desktop or mobile apps for orkut, this open source Java library provides you with that opportunity. Using three-legged OAuth, you can get friends’ profile data, post and retrieve status and activity updates, read and write scraps, create and retrieve photo albums, and upload pictures. To get started, simply download the library, check out the included samples, and start coding.

With this library, it’s easy to have an application up and running with just a few lines of code. The snippet below shows how to create a photo album, share it with your friends, and upload photos:


CreateAlbumTx createAlbum = albumsFactory.createAlbum(
  "College Days", "The best days of my life!");
Album album = createAlbum.getAlbum();
albumsFactory.shareAlbumWithFriends(album);

byte[] photo = captureImage();
photosFactory.uploadPhoto(album, photo, ImageType.JPG, "My Best Buddies");

And it’s just as simple to reply to scraps from friends and to make friends with new scrappers:


GetScrapsTx scraps = scrapFactory.getSelfScraps();
for(int i = 0; i < scraps.getScrapCount(); ++i) {
  ScrapEntry scrap = scraps.getScrap(i);
  if(myFriends.contains(scrap.getFromUserId())) {
    scrapFactory.replyToScrap(scrap, "hey, thanks for remembering me!");
  } else {
    scrapFactory.replyToScrap(scrap, "wanna be friends? [:)]");
    friendsFactory.sendFriendRequest(scrap.getFromUserId());
  }
}

As you develop your application, we’d love if you’d let us know what you create. We’re excited to see how you use this library to integrate orkut with other exciting products and technologies... and in fact, we already started! Take a look at our orkut FotoScrapr app, which we built on Google App Engine using a slick Google Web Toolkit interface. If you like what you see, feel free to browse through the FotoScrapr source code.

And finally, if you’re not a Java developer, don’t worry. We’d be thrilled to work with you to port this library to other languages. Just reach out to us on the orkut developer forum.

So dive in and start coding – we can’t wait to see what you’re going to come up with!

By Prashant Tiwari and Sachin Shenoy, orkut team

Student Applications Open for Google Summer of Code 2010

Zach — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 21:49:00 +0000

Want to work on a cool open source project, hone your development skills with the help of a dedicated mentor, and get paid? Look no further - student applications are now open for Google Summer of Code™ 2010.

Since its inception in 2005, the Google Summer of Code program has brought together nearly 3,400 students and more than 3,000 mentors from nearly 100 countries worldwide - all for the love of code. Through the program, accepted student applicants are paired with a mentor or mentors from participating projects, thus gaining exposure to real-world software development scenarios. They also receive an opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits. And best of all, more source code is created and released for the benefit of users and developers everywhere.

Full details, including pointers on how to apply, are available on the Google Open Source Blog.

By Leslie Hawthorn, Google Open Source Team

Making APIs Faster: Introducing Partial Response and Partial Update

Zach — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 16:30:00 +0000

At Google, we strive to make the web faster. Today, we’re proud to take our first big step in making APIs faster by introducing two experimental features in the Google Data Protocol, partial response and partial update. Together, partial response and partial update can drastically reduce the network, memory, and CPU resources needed to work with Google APIs.

It’s easy to understand the benefit of partial response and partial update. Imagine that you are writing a new Android calendar widget, and you want to display the time and title of the recently changed events on your Google Calendar. With the old Calendar Data API, you would request your calendar’s events feed and receive a large amount of information in response -- including lots of extra data like the attendee list and the event description.

With the addition of partial response, however, you can now use the fields query parameter to request only relevant information -- in this case, event titles and times. Constructing such a request using the fields query parameter is simple:

GET http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/zachpm@google.com/private/full?fields=entry(title,gd:when)

By including the entry argument and specifying title and gd:when, this request ensures that the partial response contains only the title and time for each event, along with a small amount of wrapping metadata.

But say you want to also enable the widget to change the time of calendar events. With partial update, you can easily accomplish this: simply edit the data you received in the partial response and use the HTTP PATCH verb to send the modified data back to the server. The server then intelligently interprets your PATCH, updating only the fields you chose to send. Throughout this entire read-modify-write cycle, the unneeded data remains server-side and untouched.

Now for a quick demo. If you’re currently logged into a Google account, compare the size of your full calendar feed and your partial calendar feed. When we ran this test, our full calendar feed contained 160 kB of data while the partial feed only contained 8 kB -- the partial response successfully reduced total data transfer by 95%! Performance enhancements like this are especially apparent on a mobile device, where every byte of memory and every CPU cycle count. In nearly all clients, partial response and partial update make it more efficient to send, store, parse, cache, and modify only the data that you need.

As of today, partial response and partial update are supported in four Google APIs:

The YouTube Data API supports partial response and partial update.

The Calendar Data API supports partial response and partial update with Java client library support.

The Picasa Web Albums Data API supports partial response and partial update with Java client library support.

The read-only Sidewiki Data API supports partial response with Java client library support.

... and we’re planning on adding support for most of the APIs that are built on the Google Data Protocol soon. Stay tuned for more information, and if you can’t wait, feel free to lobby for partial update and partial response in your favorite API’s public support group. And for those of you who’ll be at Google I/O this year, be sure to check out the Google API sessions that are in store.

Thanks for joining us in our effort to make APIs on the web as fast and as efficient as possible!

By Kyle Marvin and Zach Maier, Google Data Protocol Team

Flashy New Authentication: AuthSub Adds Support for ActionScript

Zach — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 23:38:00 +0000

Today, we are happy to announce the launch of AuthSub for ActionScript, a new component of the well-known AuthSub authentication interface for the Google Data Protocol. This new feature enables Flash and Silverlight applications to access data securely on behalf of a user, without the application ever seeing the user’s private login credentials.

To use AuthSub for Actionscript (or as we’re calling it, AuthSubAS), first ensure that the API you are accessing offers cross-domain support. To do this, simply check for a crossdomain.xml file like those offered by the Picasa Web Albums Data API and the YouTube Data API. Then, if the API supports cross-domain scripting, you can simply point your Flash app to https://accounts.googleapis.com/accounts/AuthSub{Request,SessionToken} and authenticate. If you’re familiar with how AuthSub for JavaScript works, AuthSubAS works in much the same way. For more information, see the AuthSub for ActionScript guide and check out this code sample.

Currently, cross-domain requests are only supported by the Picasa Web Albums Data API and the YouTube Data API. However, as more APIs offer cross-domain scripting through an open crossdomain.xml file, the AuthSubAS authentication will work automatically. For questions about a specific API or to encourage your API to provide AuthSubAS support sooner, visit your API’s support group in Google Groups.

By Joseph Schorr and Zach Maier, Google Data Protocol Team

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/

Zach — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:36:00 +0000

Good news, Google Data APIs are upgrading and moving to the official Google Code blog! From now on, we'll be posting all of our new and exciting news at http://googlecode.blogspot.com.

Unfortunately, that means there won't be any more posts here. However, if you need information from any of the older posts, they will all remain here indefinitely.

And of course, you can always find loads of information about all of Google's developer products at http://code.google.com/.

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/

Zach — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:36:00 +0000