Google Developer Day
31 May 2007
San Jose Convention Center, with party at Googleplex in Mountain View in the evening

I was really looking forward to this day - one had to register early and everything was free. The first day in years that I didn't pack a lunch when leaving home for a full day of work. Many new, free products were announced and made available in beta*. Familiar faces for me were mostly current and former students, my success stories...

Google hereby opens up all its tools and data to the world, or to those that know how to take advantage of them. My superficial review says they did a great job of engineering these reusable parts of web applications. May the goddess bless the open source movement! I have to rethink my hatred of advertising if it brings us all this.

• Keynote - 10:00 am
Google VP Engineering, Jeff Huber
Design of API** came from a third party 'reverse engineering' Google Maps
So Google made all these API's so others could use their work
Application languages mentioned: python, php, java, ruby
½ billion unique visitors to Google per month
maps.google.com/preview - mashup*** of mashups

• Google Web Toolkit
1 year old
Allows you to write in Java and run in JavaScript
1 million downloads

• Mashup Editor Announced
editor.googlemashups.com
A mashup requires: feed, UI, infrastructure (web server)
The user of this new free product doesn't have to know JavaScript
(Maship editor was built by Google in Java)

• Gears Announced
A browser extension for offline use
Adobe, Dojo, Google (duh!) use it

• Google Base Announced
Collection of data with its own query language.
A place to put your data where others can see it.
Connects buyers and sellers
Based on Atom publishing protocol and XML
Works well with Yahoo pipes

• Ajax API's
ajaxsearch.typepad.com
maps

* beta: prerelease version of software
** API: Application Programmer Interface: the code required to run software modules written by others.
*** Mashup: A website that contains information from more than one other website.