Isn’t it cool when….
October 20th, 2006 | Published in Google Code
As a developer who has been working on (commercial and open source) APIs and frameworks for the last several years, I can honestly say that one of the most rewarding and cool things is when another developer takes something you've done and builds on top of it in ways that you'd never imagined. That's why the folks working on the Google data APIs were excited to see this post by Charlie Wood, that includes a video clip from his presentation at Dreamforce 06, the Salesforce.com user and developer conference.
On the video clip starting around the 17:25 minute mark, Charlie talks about how he's used the Google Calendar data API to synchronize the scheduling functions of the Saleforce AppExchange API with Google Calendar, seamlessly integrating the functionality of two completely different services on the Web. The ultra-cool part of this is that Charlie doesn't work for either Google or salesforce.com, but the fact that both expose APIs made it possible for him to independently do this integration.
Some quotes from the video that make an API developer's heart beat a little faster:
"You can create something really incredibly powerful with a
really modest investment of time and energy, and even time and energy
spent learning. So if you can look at your app and see how it might
be extended by integrating with the Google apps, I'd encourage you to
do it, and I think you'll find it straightforward and pretty
rewarding." (39:20)
"The integration between Salesforce and Google Calendar has
proven to be really, really popular and really interesting to a lot of
people, so I think we'll definitely be doing integration with other
Google apps." (43:35)
Charlie, thanks for sharing what you've been up to and for working with us to help to improve the APIs.
Anyone else out there working on a cool application or service using the Google Calendar data API, the Google Base data API, the Blogger data API, or the Codesearch data API?
We want to hear about it!
Kyle Marvin
Software Engineer, Google data APIs
On the video clip starting around the 17:25 minute mark, Charlie talks about how he's used the Google Calendar data API to synchronize the scheduling functions of the Saleforce AppExchange API with Google Calendar, seamlessly integrating the functionality of two completely different services on the Web. The ultra-cool part of this is that Charlie doesn't work for either Google or salesforce.com, but the fact that both expose APIs made it possible for him to independently do this integration.
Some quotes from the video that make an API developer's heart beat a little faster:
"You can create something really incredibly powerful with a
really modest investment of time and energy, and even time and energy
spent learning. So if you can look at your app and see how it might
be extended by integrating with the Google apps, I'd encourage you to
do it, and I think you'll find it straightforward and pretty
rewarding." (39:20)
"The integration between Salesforce and Google Calendar has
proven to be really, really popular and really interesting to a lot of
people, so I think we'll definitely be doing integration with other
Google apps." (43:35)
Charlie, thanks for sharing what you've been up to and for working with us to help to improve the APIs.
Anyone else out there working on a cool application or service using the Google Calendar data API, the Google Base data API, the Blogger data API, or the Codesearch data API?
We want to hear about it!
Kyle Marvin
Software Engineer, Google data APIs