What to expect at Google I/O 2010

Back in January, we announced the start of early registration for Google I/O (our annual developer conference), and our team was excited to publish our new website for this year's event. Today, we're excited to give you a quick update on what's in store for this year's Google I/O and a brief look at what we've announced in the past five weeks.

• 63 sessions to be led by the engineering teams behind all the products to be featured at I/O, including Android, Google Chrome, Google Web Toolkit and Google Wave. We'll have over 80 sessions listed by May.
• 58 companies are listed on the Developer Sandbox page, and we expect over 150 companies to participate in the Sandbox at I/O.
• 99 speakers, including Google engineers and prominent web development experts from other companies.
• We introduced our very first I/O BootCamp, which sold out in just two days.

Of course, some things will stay under wraps until the event itself, but we're excited to share some Google I/O planning details with you in advance.

We'll be teaming up with Maker Faire again this year for our After Hours evening party. Google I/O attendees will get to preview some of the amazing DIY projects that will be showcased at Maker Faire in San Mateo just a couple of days after I/O, and discounted Maker Faire tickets will be available during After Hours. We've also invited the organizers of Gadgetoff. They'll be bringing along exciting, interactive gadgets, robots and vehicles.

Whether you're already developing apps using products like App Engine, or wondering how to get started on your first Android app, we hope to see you at Google I/O in May. To learn more and to sign up, visit code.google.com/io.

Posted by Joyce Sohn, Google Developer Team

Google I/O 2010: Now open for registration

(Cross-posted with the Google Code Blog)

I'm excited to announce that registration for Google I/O is now open at code.google.com/io. Our third annual developer conference will return to Moscone West in San Francisco on May 19-20, 2010. We expect thousands of web, mobile and enterprise developers to be in attendance.

I/O 2010 will be focused on building the next generation of applications in the cloud and will feature the latest on Google products and technologies like Android, Google Chrome, App Engine, Google Web Toolkit, Google APIs and more. Members of our engineering teams and other web development experts will lead more than 80 technical sessions. We'll also bring back the Developer Sandbox, which we introduced at I/O 2009, where developers from more than 100 companies will be on hand to demo their apps, answer questions and exchange ideas.

We'll be regularly adding more sessions, speakers and companies on the event website, and today we're happy to give you a preview of what's to come. Over half of all sessions are already listed, covering a range of products and technologies, as well as speaker bios. We've also included a short list of companies that will be participating in the Developer Sandbox. For the latest I/O updates, follow us (@googleio) on Twitter.

Today's registration opens with an early bird rate of $400, which applies through April 16 ($500 after April 16). Faculty and students can register at the discounted Academia rate of $100 (this discounted rate is limited and available on a first come, first serve basis).

Last year's I/O sold out before the start of the conference, so we encourage you to sign up in advance.

Google I/O
May 19-20, 2010
Moscone West, San Francisco

To learn more and sign up, visit code.google.com/io.

We hope to see you in May!

Posted by David Glazer, Engineering Director

Faster apps for a faster web: introducing Speed Tracer

Do you ever wonder what's going on inside the browser when a webpage doesn't load or respond as quickly as it should? Many developers do, especially when trying to build powerful web applications for their users.

But up until now, it's been difficult for developers to identify problems in a slow-to-respond application. So, tonight at Google Campfire One, we're happy to announce that we're adding a new tool to Google Web Toolkit called Speed Tracer.

Speed Tracer is a Google Chrome extension that enables developers to identify performance problems in their web apps using a "Sluggishness Graph," in combination with many other metrics. In the spirit of clean, simple design, developers need only look at the Y-Axis of their application's Sluggishness Graph to see how they're doing:

• If the y-axis is close to zero, then the app is fast
• If the y-axis registers around 100%, then the app is, well, sluggish

And in either case, Speed Tracer provides lots of additional data to help diagnose any particular performance issue.

We think developers will find that Speed Tracer looks under the covers of web applications like never before. In fact, we even used Speed Tracer to optimize the performance of Speed Tracer itself! (It's really an HTML5 application after all, built with Google Web Toolkit, and deployed as a Google Chrome extension.) If you're a web developer, download and install Speed Tracer on the Google Chrome Developer Channel.



This is one of many other improvements in GWT 2.0 — which we released at this evening's Campfire — that make building web applications fast, and the applications you build run even faster. Check out the Google Code Blog for more information and to watch our Campfire One developer announcement.

Posted by Bruce Johnson, Engineering Director

And the Google Code Jam 2009 champion is...

Last week, we hosted the the final round of Google Code Jam 2009, the sixth iteration of our annual global programming competition. From almost 23,000 registrants in the beginning, we winnowed down the contestants to the fastest and most fervent coders. On Friday, we brought the top 23 competitors to our Mountain View headquarters for four concentrated hours of thinking, testing and trouble-shooting. The competition platform, built as a 20% project by a group of Google engineers, was powered by Google App Engine and allowed the contestants to use the programming language of their choice. These diverse finalists represented 15 different countries across Europe, Asia and the Americas.

The contestants were confronted by six puzzles. In one, they had to take on the role of a telecommunications company upgrading some of its equipment. The company wants to upgrade its most profitable cell towers; however, doing so might force them to upgrade less profitable towers as well — at a high cost. The contestants were charged with figuring out which towers to upgrade, to maximize gains and minimize costs. The competitors used their coding skills to figure out the most efficient solution as quickly as possible.

Last year's champion, Lou Tiancheng of China, code-named ACRush, once again took top honors and the $5,000 grand prize. Qi Zichao of China won second place, and Iwata Yoichi of Japan came in third.

For a glimpse into this year's Code Jam take look at the video below, courtesy of NBC. And to all the coders out there, we hope to see you next year — start practicing now!



Posted by Bartholomew Furrow, 20% Tech Lead for Google Code Jam

Save the date: Google I/O 2010

We thought we'd let you know that our largest developer conference will be returning to Moscone Center, San Francisco on May 19-20, 2010. Find out more details on the Google Code Blog!

Posted by Joyce Sohn, Google Developer Team

Teaming up with Adobe and the Open Screen Project

At Google, we've been working closely with the folks at Adobe for years. Some of our most exciting projects such as YouTube, Android, Google Site Search, Google Chrome and even Google web search require close integration with Adobe's technologies. Our engineering teams regularly exchange ideas, tips and bugs as we build upon each others' efforts.

Along these lines, we're excited to be joining Adobe's Open Screen Project, an initiative established a year and a half ago to help developers more easily design content for the web across multiple screens using the Flash Platform. We've always believed that open platforms lead to greater innovation on the web and we see participating in the Open Screen Project as another step in that direction. We're excited to continue working with the teams at Adobe on pushing the web forward and to see where the next generation of web development will take us.

Posted by Bill Coughran, Senior Vice President of Engineering

Surf's up Wednesday: Google Wave update

Starting Wednesday, September 30 we'll be sending out more than 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave to:

• Developers who have been active in the developer preview we started back in June
• The first users who signed up and offered to give feedback on wave.google.com
• Select business and university customers of Google Apps

We'll ask some of these early users to nominate people they know also to receive early invitations — Google Wave is a lot more useful if your friends, family and colleagues have it too. This, of course, will just be the beginning. If all goes well we will soon be inviting many more to try out Google Wave.

Some of you have asked what we mean by preview. This just means that Google Wave isn't quite ready for prime time. Not yet, anyway. Since first unveiling the project back in May, we've focused almost exclusively on scalability, stability, speed and usability. Yet, you will still experience the occasional downtime, a crash every now and then, part of the system being a bit sluggish and some of the user interface being, well, quirky.

There are also still key features of Google Wave that we have yet to fully implement. For example, you can't yet remove a participant from a wave or define groups of users, draft mode is still missing and you can't configure the permissions of users on a wave. We'll be rolling out these and other features as soon as they are ready — over the next few months.

Despite all this, we believe you will find that Google Wave has the potential for making you more productive when communicating and collaborating. Even when you're just having fun! We use it ourselves everyday for everything from planning pub crawls to sharing photos, managing release processes and debating features to writing design documents. In fact, we collaborated on this very blog post with several colleagues in Google Wave.

Speaking of ways you could potentially use Google Wave, we're intrigued by the many detailed ones people have taken the time to describe. To mention just a few: journalist Andy Ihnatko on producing his Chicago Sun-Times column, filmmaker Jonathan Poritsky on streamlining the movie-making process, scientist Cameron Neylon on academic papers and lab work, Alexander Dreiling and his SAP research team on collaborative business process modelling, and ZDNet's Dion Hincliffe on a host of enterprise use cases.

The Wave team's most fun day since May? We invited a group of students to come spend a day with us at Google's Sydney office. Among other things, we asked them to collaboratively write stories in Google Wave about an imaginary trip around the world. They had a ball! As did we... 



Finally, a big shoutout to the thousands of developers who have patiently taken part in our ongoing developer preview. It has been great fun to see the cool extensions already built or being planned and incredibly instructive to get their help planning the future of our APIs. To get a taste for what some of these creative developers have been working on, and to learn more about the ways we hope to make it even easier for developers to build new extensions, check out this post on our developer blog.

Happy waving!

Posted by Lars Rasmussen, Engineering Manager & Stephanie Hannon, Group Product Manager

Developers, start your engines

Posted by Kevin Gibbs, Tech Lead, Google App Engine

We just launched a preview release of Google App Engine, a way for developers to run their web applications on Google's infrastructure. In the same way that Blogger made it easy to create a blog, Google App Engine is designed from the ground up to make it easy to create and run web applications.

With Google App Engine, developers can write web applications based on the same building blocks that Google uses, like GFS and Bigtable. Google App Engine packages those building blocks and provides access to scalable infrastructure that we hope will make it easier for developers to scale their applications automatically as they grow. This means they can spend less time dealing with system administration and maintenance, and more time building and improving their applications. (There's more detail on the new App Engine Blog.)

Google App Engine is free to use during the preview release, but the amount of computing resources any app can use is limited. In the future, developers will be able to purchase additional computing resources as needed, but Google App Engine will always be free to get started.

Today's launch is a preview release. We've got a lot left to do, and there are a lot of features we still want to add to the system. What we'd really like is to get your feedback on it, so we know which features are most important to you. We'll use your suggestions to keep improving the system.

This preview of Google App Engine is available for the first 10,000 developers who sign up; we will increase that number in near future. So, developers, please sign up, download the SDK, and start your engines.

OpenSocial continues to grow: Welcome, Yahoo!

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager

Last November, OpenSocial was created to help build infrastructure for the social web. OpenSocial provides a common mechanism for developers to easily hook into many different social networks and extend their functionality. Sites including MySpace and orkut have begun to provide OpenSocial applications to their users, and hi5 will be rolling out next week.

Today we're pleased that Yahoo! has announced its support for OpenSocial. We're looking forward to having Yahoo! users join the hundreds of millions of people who will soon enjoy OpenSocial applications. This addition means even more distribution for developers, encourages participation by even more websites, and, most importantly, results in more features for users all across the web.

In addition, Yahoo!, MySpace, and Google are joining with the broader community to create a non-profit foundation to foster the continued open development of OpenSocial. To that end, we've also launched OpenSocial.org, designed to become the main documentation hub and primary source of information about OpenSocial. To learn more, and to get involved, please review the foundation proposal.

With that, welcome, Yahoo! We look forward to growing the social web together.

New Google AJAX Language API - Tools for translation and language detection

Posted by Brandon Badger, Product Manager

The main goal of our AJAX APIs team is to provide developers with the tools needed to create the next generation of great web applications. Our 20% goal is world peace. What better way to help further both objectives than to launch a Language API? :)

The API helps developers automatically translate content in their applications. Users on these sites will have an easier time communicating across lingual boundaries.

The Language API provides both translation and language detection. Here's an example of the translation tool in action:



You can play around with the language detection capabilities via this example widget:



For more information on how to use the Language API in your code, please refer to the documentation here.