New GData API: Spreadsheets

A new GData API is available today, for spreadsheets in Google Docs & Spreadsheets:

"Now there is the possibility of getting a feed listing your updated spreadsheets, and since there is more than one way to think of a spreadsheet, we give you two different feed schemas for viewing. A worksheet could be viewed as entries of individual cells or as a list of rows similar to a database table."

Check out the GData blog for further details!

Announcing the Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series: Guido van Rossum

As part of our ongoing efforts to bolster collaboration between Google and the open source community, we're pleased to announce that the Open Source Program Office will begin hosting a monthly "Open Source Developers @ Google" Speaker Series. Several of our colleagues at Google who are open source contributors will be providing insight into their work at Google. All sessions will be open to the public and we'll also be making the presentations available on Google Video.

Guido van Rossum, author of the Python programming language and recently named Distinguished Engineer by the Association for Computing Machinery, will be our first speaker. Guido will discuss "Mondrian - Code Review over the Web" on Thursday, November 30th at Google Corporate Headquarters, Building 43 from 7:00 - 8:00 PM. We look forward to seeing you there!

MySQL Camp at Google

Post by Kynan Dent and Michael Still, community-loving SysAdmins

A few weekends ago Google hosted the first-ever MySQL Camp in Mountain View, and it was a huge success with over 200 registered participants and lots of un-registered folks showing up.

For those of you who missed out on the action, some of the main talks included:

• MySQL Internals: with several presentations on the Core Kernel, creating new Pluggable Storage Engines (PSEs), and custom data types
• Cluster, cluster and more cluster: cluster approaches, load balancing, cluster jam and MySQL Cluster Python and Java APIs
• New storage engines: SolidDB, ScaleDB
• Various community presentations and their announcements including:
  • MySQL Winter of Code - Kaj Arnö (MySQL's Vice President of Community) claims more code is written in winter, so MySQL has launched a project in the style of Google's "Summer of Code" to harness this potential.
  • The Community Doxgyen Project
  • The Quality Contributor Program
• MySQL Replibeeration - Hopefully to become a tradition, a talk about Beer Replication or was it Replication with Beer!
• Insider information on Falcon, MyISAM++, a question and answer session with the MySQL CEO (Mårten Mickos).
• Several talks by local Googlers on the google-mysql-tools and MySQL scalability.
• An article entitled "Interactive Developer Zone Top Performance Tips" written interactively in real time by participants. The outcome of this talk will be posted to the MySQL Developer Zone soon.

The unconference format created an excellent opportunity for interactive participation in discussions, as well as a flexible schedule, so lots more went on than you see in the list above, more even than in the official schedule!

More details can be found at MySQLCamp.org, and blog reviews about the camp should turn up on the MySQL Planet.

Big hugs to everyone from the MySQL community who joined us here at Google over the weekend, and thanks for running what turned out to be a great social and technical event! Google is proud to be associated with such a fantastic community.

JSON in GData

The GData team just shipped JSON support for Google Base, Blogger, and Calendar feeds. Check out the updated documentation and samples, and the GData blog for further details:

"For those of you who have been trying to build client-side GData mashups but have been thwarted by the same-origin policy, we have some good news for you: you can now get public Base, Blogger, and Calendar feeds as JSON! This means that you can start displaying GData in your web page with a little JavaScript."

Subversion upgraded to 1.4

If you use our project hosting service to manage your open source code, then you'll be happy to hear that we're now running Subversion 1.4. In short, this means you can now use the svnsync tool to both push and pull version-control history to and from your Google Code repository. You can read about pushing and pulling in our FAQ.

Code Search in More Languages

Post by Miguel Garcia, Software Engineer

Today is a multilingual day for Google Code Search. You can now use its interface in Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, and Spanish.

We also added support for languages of another type as well -- Code Search now detects code in more programming languages (AppleScript, COBOL, ColdFusion, Haskell, Modula-2, Modula-3, OCaml, R, Rebol, SML, and VHDL), which appear in the language drop-down on the Advanced Code Search page. If your programming language of choice isn't in there, just use the the file: operator to restrict your search to files with the right extensions. For example, you could restrict your search to files with a .zz extension with a query like foo file:\.zz$. (More info in the FAQ.)

As a Spanish engineer in Google's Zurich office, my days tend to be pretty multilingual. So it's been great to be part of the effort to help Google Code Search understand a few new languages as well.

Google Checkout HTML API

Thanks to developer feedback requesting easier Google Checkout integration, the Checkout engineering team just released a simple HTML API. The Checkout blog has further details:

"Just send us a shopping cart via an HTML form with name=value pairs, and manage the orders using our Merchant Center interface. You can easily specify shipping options and sales tax options in the shopping cart as well."

Announcing Google Web Toolkit 1.2

As reported on the GWT blog, Google Web Toolkit 1.2 is now available! Aside from lots of bug fixes and performance optimization, the biggest news in this release is Mac support, which is further explained on the Google Mac blog. (even better, GWT for the Mac supports the fancy WebKit DOM Inspector!)

If you're a Java developer working on web applications with AJAX, definitely check out Google Web Toolkit.

AJAX Search API: Modules, Widgets and Templates

Post by Tom Stocky, Product Manager; also posted to the AJAX Search API blog

We're excited to see people building support for the Google AJAX Search API into lots of popular web publishing tools:

• Wordpress Video Bar Widget from Rune Fjellheim (aka "Daiko")
• Drupal Module from Maciej Perlinski at Meant4
• Blogger beta Template from Hoctro, also see one from Waipot Ngamsaad

(We mentioned templates for Blogger and Typepad in an earlier post.)

Thanks to everyone who has built tools to make it easier to use the AJAX Search API. If you know about others, let us know!

Google Sponsors the LinuxBIOS project

Post by Stefan Reinauer, LinuxBIOS project

The LinuxBIOS project aims to take down the last barrier in Open Source systems by providing a free firmware (BIOS) implementation. LinuxBIOS celebrates its Sixth anniversary this year, and has an installed base of over 1 million LinuxBIOS systems. With the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, that number is expected to exceed 10 million users in 2007. LinuxBIOS supports 65 mainboards from 31 vendors in v1 and another 56 mainboards from 27 vendors in v2.

There's always been one main obstacle for our project though: unlike other free software, LinuxBIOS can easily make your hardware a paperweight if you encounter a bug (unless you happen to have a spare flash chip...). Thanks to Google's sponsorship, we've been able to significantly improve the project's Quality Assurance process by creating a completely automated and distributed testing environment. Every single commit results in BIOS images being built for all mainboards, and tested on real hardware located all over the world. So whenever you want to download a LinuxBIOS image, you can now know that it works on a reference machine before flashing it to your system.

A per-revision overview is available, as are test results for specific revisions, and you can even get detailed reports that include extensive logs for each motherboard. Developers can also use the build and test system without checking their code into the LinuxBIOS repository. The automatic build client has an option to submit BIOS images to the test system manually; you can see an overview of manually triggered builds here. Anyone with a spare board supported by LinuxBIOS is welcome to put it into the automated test system, thus helping the LinuxBIOS project increase their quality on your hardware.

Ubuntu Developer Summit at Google

Last week, Google hosted the Ubuntu Developer Summit at our Mountain View headquarters. Developers and community members from across the world congregated over six days to plan the next release of Ubuntu Linux, code named Feisty Fawn. More details about the technical sessions are available. For those interested in learning more about the distro and community, you may enjoy the video of Mark Shuttleworth's presentation to interested Googlers about Ubuntu.

Thanks to the Ubuntu community for visiting and being such wonderful guests!

Introduction to the Atom Publishing Protocol

Over at IBM developerWorks, James Snell just posted the second article in an outstanding series about the Atom Publishing Protocol:

Part 1: Create and edit Web resources with the Atom Publishing Protocol
Part 2: Put the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) to work

I'm mentioning this here because Part 2 includes several Java examples that utilize GData's Base, Blogger and Calendar feeds.

Google Summer of Code Update: Adium

Evan Schoenberg, mentor and organization administrator for Adium, has posted a writeup on Adium's participation in GSoC 2006.  It's wonderful to hear that several of their students plan to continue working on Adium; it's also great to see that the Adium is further benefiting from GSoC through work done by a student working with the Gaim project this summer.  Evan also included some advice for students interested in working with Adium for GSoC, and his advice is definitely useful to any student thinking of applying for the program next year:

Get the code and have a look around before making time estimates. Parts of Adium are, to be honest, pretty spaghetti-like code. It's also a lot larger than most student projects. Having a feel for these issues will help you plan more accurately. Google Summer of Code is intended to be a full-time internship, demanding full-time hours; schedule your summer appropriately, as it will be fun but also hard work.

Congratulations to Adium's mentors and students for all of their achievements this summer, and many thanks to Adium for joining us in the program once again!

Google and Creative Commons

Because of the important work Creative Commons accomplished over the past year, Google has decided again to donate $30,000 to their cause. Here's an update on some of the awesome work they've been doing:

• ccHost, the engine that powers ccMixter, developed further support for more media types (audio, video, image, text). It also won the LinuxWorld Product Excellence Award for "Best Open Source Solution" in August 2006.


• ccPublisher can connect to other media repositories (such as the Internet Archive), and has been localized.
  


• Creative Commons established an open source developer's community, a portal for discussion lists, projects and challenges that focus on the standards and technology that support the Creative Commons licenses.


• From January 2006 to July 2006, CC license linkbacks grew from 40,000,000 to 140,000,000, indicating a near exponential growth in CC license adoption.