Every once in a while, we invite members of the developer community on campus to talk shop, share some news, and eat S'mores. We call this series of events, "Google Campfire One."
We announced OpenSocial at our first Campfire One back in November 2007, and we're looking forward to discussing other yet-to-be-announced products and initiatives at future gatherings. In the mean time, feel free to browse past events (below), or checkout related sessions at Google I/O, our upcoming developer conference in San Francisco (May 27-28, 2009).
Last April, Google App Engine took its first step in making Google's scalable infrastructure available to all developers. But if you work on larger projects, or with enterprise systems, the initial Python-only release may not have met your needs. In response, App Engine is now giving developers an early look at its support for the Java programming language.
Google App Engine now provides standard Java APIs and libraries, enabling Java developers to work with familiar tools and frameworks, as well as deploy their apps to any standard J2EE servlet container. App Engine's "early look" also includes an end-to-end Java solution for AJAX web applications, with a Java runtime, integration with Google Web Toolkit, and a Google Plugin for Eclipse.
In addition to Java language support, Google App Engine now offers database import, cron support, and policy-based access to firewalled data. Checkout the App Engine roadmap to keep tabs on what's coming next.
(Note: beginning April 7th, we're giving the first 10,000 interested developers an early look at App Engine's Java language support.)
As a webmaster, you may have tried adding social features to your site — from comments, to ratings and reviews, to photo uploaders. Building this kind of functionality can be quite difficult, however, and visitors are less and less likely to create a new friends list just to use your website.
Google Friend Connect enables webmasters to quickly and easily enhance their site with community features; what's more, these features leverage visitors' existing social ties. By simply copying and pasting a few lines of JavaScript, you can implement the social functionality you want, and visitors can connect with their Facebook, orkut and other friends directly on your website.
Google Friend Connect offers an array of social applications built by Google, and the OpenSocial developer community — webmasters need only choose the ones they want. With minimal effort, you'll have a more compelling, interactive website that'll keep visitors (and their friends) coming back.
If you've ever tried building and deploying a web app, you've no doubt realized — like we have — that the upfront infrastructure costs and challenges are significant. From writing Apache configs, to setting up monitoring, to finding machines (including money to pay for them!), launching a live service isn't for the faint of heart.
Google App Engine enables developers to build their web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google's own apps. (This way, you can focus on what's really important: designing and launching a great product.)
Out of the box, developers have access to Google App Engine's free quota of 500MB in persistent storage, and 5M monthly pageviews. With a fully-integrated development environment, Google App Engine also makes it easy to grow your web app from one to millions of users, without the infrastructure headache.
If you've been involved in web development, you've noticed the continued trend towards more social applications. The web is definitely more interesting when you can build apps that easily interact with your friends and colleagues. With this trend has also come a growing list of site-specific APIs that developers must learn.
OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. Using standard JavaScript and HTML, they enable developers to create apps that access a social network's friends and update feeds.
Common APIs mean you only have to learn once in order to build for multiple websites. OpenSocial is currently being developed by Google in conjunction with members of the web community. The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the APIs and host 3rd party social applications.
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