7 April 2010
“Google Apps Marketplace”
hosted by the Google Technology User’s Group at Google in Mountain View
http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace

As you may know, Google has a number of web applications that are free to use. These include Google docs, Gmail, Google Sites, Calendar, Contacts, et al. Google has made it possible for software developers to create applications on top of these web applications. They have done this by creating an “API” , or application programmer’s interface, to the functionality in their web applications.

Some software developers have therefore created vertical applications for specific uses, applications that apply the general features in docs, mail, calendar, etc to specific workflow problems. Since these Google web applications allow collaboration, the new third party vertical applications feature collaboration amongst many users.

These new apps are not required to be written in a specific language, and they do not have to be hosted in any particular place. The only requirement is that the new apps use OpenID and OpenAuth, so that the user only has to login once to run any of the apps.

If you create a Google App, then you can put it onto the Google Apps Marketplace and people will buy it. The Marketplace only started 3 months ago (Nov 2009), so noone has made any money there yet. But apparently the only marketing a developer needs to do is to put their app on the Marketplace website, and they need no sales people whatsoever.

This meeting showcased a number of Google Apps Developers demonstrating their products. They looked pretty useful and claimed development times of less then 6 months. They said that they let customers download and use their products for up to 2 users for free. But since collaboration is such a big benefit of theses programs, the users pay around $20 per month per additional user. Google takes 20% of the revenue.


14 April 2010
“Closure Library”
hosted by ACCU at Symantec in Mountain View
http://accu.org/index.php/accu_branches/accu_usa/next

“Closure library” is a JavaScript library created by Google to make many of its web applications. In fact, the Closure library was used to create Mail, Docs, Sites, Calendar, Picasa, Books, and even this site (Blogger). You can find more about it here:
http://code.google.com/closure/library/
Nathan Naze was one of the authors of the library, and he presented to us. He helped start the Closure library as his 20% time project - Google allows every engineer to work 20% of their time on their own projects.

The library includes a “compiler” that is a super-minifier for your code, and enforces good programming practices. In particular, the “compiler” enforces types, constructors, parameters, etc. Comments are written in JSDOC style. This type of enforcement is especially valuable in the JavaScript language.

Dependency, that is code that depends on other code, is also a big problem with JavaScript, and it appears to be solved with this library. Collaboration and code reuse are big benefits of this.

Google just recently made this library open source. The code was “thrown over the wall” in Nov 2009. The codebase contains all the useual widgets, including a great editor.