Sydney

AJAX applications are at the core of web development, providing both opportunities and challenges. We'll be discussing some of the ways we can address those challenges in this session. More details will be provided at Developer Day.

Aaron Boodman started life as a musician, a mistake he rectified early to the delight of his teachers and dormmates. Suddenly finding himself with more time on his hands, he taught himself to program and began experimenting with and writing about the collection of technologies that became known as "AJAX" many years later. His work from 2000-2001 continues to be referenced and reused today in modern JavaScript toolkits. More recently, he is the creator of Greasemonkey, a popular browser extension that allows people to "mash up" websites using JavaScript. At Google he works on experimental web technology, and occasionally lends a hand on UI for products like Gmail, Reader, and Blogger.

Thousands of Google Maps mashups have been created in the two years since we released the Google Maps API, but most of these sites are islands of information and few users know that they exist. We will discuss an approach to make these sites more discoverable by users around the world. More details will be provided at Developer Day.

James Macgill holds a PhD from the University of Leeds in the UK where he worked on innovative spatial analysis techniques. James subsequently worked as deputy director of the Centre for Computational Geography at Leeds on a variety of geospatial research initiatives. Among those was the foundation of the open source GeoTools library, a Java GIS toolkit for developing standards compliant solutions which now powers a number of other open source geospatial projects including GeoServer and uDIG. Before moving to Google in 2005, James was a Senior Researcher at the Penn State GeoVISTA Center, working on research in geovisualization methods and tools.

The Google Maps API lets you create compelling maps mashups on your websites.  In this session, we'll go over all of the latest features in the API.  You'll learn how to take your maps mashups to the next level and discover how to build highly interactive maps with the Google Maps API, learn about controls, overlays, and map events using the API, how to create custom overlays, either programmaticaly or using KML and GeoRSS and understand how to optimise performance of your maps.

Bo Majewski received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Queensland. Upon completion he moved to Newcastle, where for 2 years he taught algorithms, networks and software engineering. In 1998 Bo left the academia, and Australia, to pursue career in software industry in the heart of Silicon Valley where he worked in diverse areas such as computer graphics, electronic commerce and computer networks. Bo was eventually drawn back to the Land Down Under and joined Google Australia in Dec 2005. He currently spends most of his time working on Google Maps and supporting projects.

Got content but want attention? Learn how to take your web application and make it distribute to millions of users and tens of thousands of sites across the internet by making a Google universal Gadget. In this session, we'll introduce Gadgets and their ecosystem, show you just how easy it is to make your first gadget, and go over some interesting advanced techniques that will really make your gadget pop. A Q&A session will follow.

Zhen Wang is a core member of the Google Gadgets team, mainly working on Gadget API and integration with other Google products. Prior to joining Google, Zhen studied A.I. and forensics as a Ph.D. (incomplete) student at Nanyang Technological University.

Why Google supports and uses open source, why it is good for us, and why you should use it too.  Followed by an overview of Google's extensive collection of APIs for use by third party developers including the Google Maps API, the Google AJAX Search API, the Google Gadgets API and much more.   This session will then explore the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), a Java-centric framework for creating AJAX applications. GWT cross-compiles Java source into JavaScript, allowing Java developers to use their existing Java skills and tools to easily create AJAX applications with virtually no learning curve.  Lars will contrast using the toolkit with his experience 'hand-rolling' the AJAX of Google Maps, and if time allows, demonstrate building a simple application with GWT.

Lars Eilstrup Rasmussen is a member of Google's technical staff and a lead engineer of the team that created Google Maps. He currently works out of Google's young but growing Sydney engineering office and is actively working to expand Google's engineering presence in Australia. Lars holds a Ph.D. in theoretical computer science from the University of California at Berkeley, which nominated his thesis on approximate counting for the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. In early 2003, Lars co-founded with his brother Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen a mapping-related startup, Where 2 Technologies, which was acquired by Google in October of 2004.

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.  The Google Data protocol helps accomplish this by providing a common mechanism for accessing a myriad of Google services. It embraces the Atom syndication format and the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) and uses the extension mechanisms adopted by these standards to expose services like Picasa, Google Calendar, Google Spreadsheets, Google Base, Blogger and more.  This talk will give an overview of the protocol and dive into some example applications -- including a tool to publish events from a Google Spreadsheet to Google Calendar and Google Base.  Previous knowledge of HTTP and XML is beneficial.

Prakash Barathan is a member of core Google Data API team, primarily working on conformance framework to ensure consistency across GData API implementations. Prior to joining Google, Prakash was involved in layer3 network design, planning and analysis especially for US government agencies, large scale enterprises and service providers including Telstra. Prakash is a proud Jayhawk with masters in computer engineering from Univeristy of Kansas.

Want to take your Google Earth layers to the next level?  In this session will go over advanced techniques using KML.  We'll show you how to add very large datasets to Google Earth without sacrificing performance using Regions. You'll also learn how to animate your data using time stamps and the use of Network Links to create KML layers that are dynamically updated.  This is the session to attend in order to learn about the latest features in KML and get a peek into underlying structure of KML along with the KML schema.

For many years, Michael was a research engineer in Ireland and worked on deeply unsexy problems in tribology and plasticity theory. To his surprise, he found that Google was willing to pay him to work on his hobby full time, so now he works on very sexy problems in Google Earth and KML.