Google Developer Podcast

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs Last year, Steve Yegge posted about Rhino on Rails, his port of Ruby on Rails to the JavaScript language on the Rhino runtime. It garnered a slew of interest, and I have been wanting to talk to him in more detail about the project. Fortunately, I happened to be at the Google Kirkland office and Steve graciously had time to spend talking about the framework. Steve is an entertaining chap, and manages to keep you interested with long blog entries, and did the same as I chatted with him. In the conversation we cover the germination of the project, why Steve went ahead with the port, the side effects of JavaScript on the server, how Rhino will be implementing JavaScript 2 / ECMAScript 4 (with Google committing engineers to the project), the intent to open source RnR, and random thoughts from a language geek. Give it a watch, and let us know if there are any other questions you would have liked to ask

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs This week has seen two new series to cover Open Web technology. One of the messages from Google I/O was explaining how Google believes in, and is frankly betting on the Web as its platform. You should expect to see increasing examples of how we are putting our money (and effort) where our mouth is on this. Since the Web is so decentralized, we have a deep need to communicate and discuss where we, as a collective are heading. I have the pleasure to be joined by Alex Russell, notably of the Dojo Foundation, and John Resig, both creator of jQuery and employee of Mozilla Corp, for a new Open Web Podcast that focuses on news, events, and opinion on the state of the Open Web. In the first episode, which you can either download directly or subscribe to, we delve into a lot of topics including new APIs and specifications, the new charge behind Firebug, the Open Web Foundation, and much more. The early part of the podcast actually discusses the other series that started this week. Mark Pilgrim, a team-mate of mine at Google, kicked off This Week in HTML 5. Mark is taking the time to keep track of the myriad of changes to the specification, and will keep us abreast of the important features and decisions that are made by the group, head by our own Ian Hickson. Mark discusses the big additions of Web Workers (Gears Workers standardized), and the clarification of alt tag usage in the img tag to have you using alt="{diagram}" and the like. If you are interested in keeping up to date on HTML 5, you can subscribe to the WHATWG feed which is where Mark is doing his work. If there is anything else that you would like to see from us, please drop us a comment below!

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs How do you like your Code Review? Choose from text to audio (iTunes) and video. We have had a varied couple of weeks, so I decided to turn on the camera, even though I am in Eldora, Colorado, up in the mountains. First up, the Open Web Foundation. I discuss the new foundation and what it is trying to accomplish (not another standards org!). Then we stay on the topic of the Open Web and browsers, and how Vladimir Vukićević has an promising implementation of Canvas in IE. excanvas has done this for awhile by first emulating VML, and more recently with a Silverlight bridge. Vladimir is a Mozilla hacker, and he managed to shoehorn the Firefox Canvas code in via an <object>. We have worked out how to license our code, but what about the other stuff that a project has? What about the documentation, the samples, the protocols? The Google Code team now allows you to choose a content license to cover those bases. Just a simple drop down away in your project hosting area. Elsewhere, in Google Code land, the code review tool that we talked about early has now made its way to Google Code. Now you can say "Looks Good To Me" to your buddies source code as he puts in a new commit on your new opensource project. One of the most requested features on Google Code is more RSS feeds, and we have obliged with support for issues, downloads, subversion changes, and wiki updates. Now you have the new tools, how about searching over that large amount of code that we are putting out there? Code Search just got a lot better with rich outlines showing you meta data on the file that you are in, and hyperlinking includes and such. Moving to Ajax and the Web for a second. One of the common requests that we have had since we launched the AJAX Libraries API, is to be able to access the Google hosted popular opensource libraries on https as well. And, now we do. If your application is on https and you don't want users to see any "mixed content" messages, go ahead and use https on us too!Google XML Pages (GXP) is a templating system we use at Google. Its main focus is markup: we mostly use it for generating HTML and XHTML, but it can work with other flavors of XML, like Atom, KML, and RSS. It also has some support for a few non-markup languages (JavaScript, CSS and plain text), though mostly for embedding them within markup.Check it out and see how some of the Google products do the view side of MVC on the Web. I didn't even know that Google Health was built using GWT, so it was interesting to read a retrospective on the decision. What else has been going on? Here are a few random things:Google Calendar supports CalDAV: This is experimental, but means that you can kick up iCal and have bi-directional sync.QR Code in Charts API: QR codes are 2D bar codes. You can store anything you want, but commonly people put URLs and contact information in there, that mobile phones can quickly scan.Finally, Google Developer Day is coming to Europe, so if you are in that neck of the woods in September and October, please stop by!

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs We are trying an experiment, putting up Code Review in a variety of formats, from text to audio (iTunes) and video. After a great trip to Brazil and Mexico for the Google Developer Day events (Europe in September and October) I am back at it. There has been some great news in the last week or so, shall we take a peak? The GData team announced OAuth support around the horn. OAuth is:An open protocol to allow secure API authentication in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.And, now you can use the standard to access Google services. This is great, as you can write your applications to the one standard, and have it work across various back-ends. There was some great news that Google, Yahoo!, and Adobe participated in. We have improved Flash indexing working with Adobe's Searchable SWF library, and some smart algorithms. We can now add URLs that are part of the SWF to the pipeline, and can fire off events to grab more data. This is another improved step (we could grok text in the SWF before) and we hope to see many more as we get better at indexing richer and more varied content on the Web. There were some good open source releases too: Kenton Varda discussed the release of Protocol Buffers, a core piece of Google infrastructure as we optimize working with structured data. We also open sourced the Browser Sync code to see if a community wants to come together to continue to support it. Testing is tough, and we saw two interesting releases that sit in very different realms of the testing world. Firstly, the Selenium team produced Selenium Ice a great new way to drive Internet Explorer as you test your Web applications. Secondly, if you are a C++ developer and you like testing, you may be interested to take a peak at the Google Testing library for C++ that we released. The GData teams have also come up with a couple more releases to go along with the big OAuth announcement. The first lies with Google Calendar. You can access your GCal data through GData, but what if you just want a nice visualization of the calendar on your website? CalVis does just that. You get to customize the look and feel, and the library does the rest. If you are building rich mashups and happen to access multiple Google services, we have tried to make the UI cleaner for your users. You can now add multiple scopes for both AuthSub and OAuth. Here is a sample AuthSub URL; Note the space delimited scope:https://www.google.com/accounts/AuthSubRequest? next=http://localhost/authsub &scope=http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds%20 http://picasaweb.google.com/data &secure=1 &session=1Mrinal Wadhwa flex-ed his muscles to add Gears support to Flex applications via a nice simple library. If you are building Flex applications and want access to the growing Gears components, check it out. Yesterday was a very Web "3D" day. We released Lively a 3D virtual experience that is the newest addition to Google Labs. It lets you create an avatar and rooms to hang out in. I also saw that Vivaty launched, and some are talking about how virtual worlds are hot in the Valley. Lively has GTalk integration, and we just released Google talk for iPhone just in time for the new iPhone 3G launch at the end of the week. I will probably head down to one of the Apple Stores and upgrade myself! As always, thanks for reading, listening, or watching, and let us know if there is anything that you would like to see.