Bringing Google’s Cloud technology to Google Earth & Maps Enterprise

Our vision for Google Earth and Google Maps has always been to create a digital mirror of the world where any user, anywhere, and from any device or platform can access current, authoritative, accurate, and rich information about the world around them. In order to provide fast and timely maps to our users, we’ve developed powerful geo infrastructure that lets us process and serve petabytes of imagery and basemap data to hundreds of millions of users.

We frequently hear requests from governments and businesses - some of whom use our existing Enterprise Earth & Maps products today - that they would like to have greater access to some of the infrastructure we’ve built in order to more easily store their geospatial data in the cloud and more easily build and publish maps for their users.

Today we announced Google Earth Builder, which continues the spirit of providing more access to Google’s core infrastructure, such as Google App Engine and Google Exacycle.



Google Earth Builder is an Enterprise mapping platform powered by Google’s cloud technology. We’ve built Google Earth Builder with the idea that any organization with their own mapping data - be it terabytes of imagery or just a few basemap layers - should be able to upload and manage that data in the cloud. They can use Google’s scalable infrastructure to process and securely serve it through familiar Google Earth and Maps interfaces to their users.

Our goal for Google Earth Builder is to enable Enterprises that work with geospatial data and create online maps to be able perform these tasks in the cloud. Over time we anticipate providing access to more and more of our geo infrastructure through Google Earth Builder, so businesses have more options for how to process, publish and analyze their geospatial data. We’re excited to launch Google Earth Builder in Q3, and in the meantime if you are interested in learning more then please get in touch.

Posted by Brian McClendon, Google VP of Earth and Maps

5 great user-created maps chronicling Egypt

During the crisis in Egypt, third-party Geo developers helped the international community understand the situation and keep persons affected by the crisis safe through the use of innovative new tools. These same tools can be replicated by anyone in any crisis situation. In the developer examples below, three things jump out as particularly striking: How quickly these maps were built and put into action, some within hours of the first protests; how developers (many contributing independently) from all over the world worked together to get these maps up and running; and how geo-context has become extremely important for the international community in understanding and responding to any crisis, be it natural or man-made.

NY Times - Mapping the Protest in Cairo Day by Day

In this map, the New York Times has plotted the locations of the protests and clashes with police. There are also pictures, videos and contextual information provided in the icon info bubbles.

Al Jazeera - Mapping the Day of Wrath

This website features a video illustrating the geographic spread of the protests using fly-over animations in Google Earth. The same webpage includes maps with information about protests in Cairo and throughout Egypt.

Hypercities Egypt

Twitter’s real-time updates have become an invaluable tool for the Egyptian protest organizers, observers and citizens looking to stay safe. Hypercities Egypt used Google Maps to display geolocated tweets as they came streaming in. Also, view another Egypt Twitter map created by MiBazaar.


GeoEye Tahrir Square Imagery

The imagery above is of Tahrir Square on January 29, 2011 at around 10:30am local time from more than 400 miles above. This imagery is exclusively viewable in Google Earth (and the Earth API) using the historical imagery tool. The imagery highlights GeoEye's stunning ability to respond to world events and capture timely imagery.

Egypt Protests in Google My Maps by Storyful.com

During the crisis, many Geo developers and persons without a Geo developer background collaborated on Google My Maps to chronicle the events geographically as they unfolded, such as this one by Storyful. Using the My Maps tool, anyone with access to Google Maps could create a collaborative mash-up with custom icons, colored polygons, content rich info-bubbles and many other features. Once completed, the map can be shared globally through My Maps or embedded on a website. Access can also be restricted to a select group of people if need be. Learn more at http://maps.google.com/getmaps.

-----------

How you can help: During a crisis situation, up-to-date maps are often crucial for organizing humanitarian aid and effective response. In many regions, however, accurate and local map data is sparse, out of date, or not available at all. You can add your geographic knowledge to Google Maps by contributing map edits in Google Map Maker, which is currently available in select countries and territories.

-----------

Posted by Carlos Cuesta, Geo APIs Product Marketing Manager

Mapplets to transition out of Google Maps

[Cross-posted from the Google Geo Developers Blog]

Earlier this year we announced the deprecation of Google Mapplets. As part of the deprecation plan for Mapplets we will shortly be switching from rendering Mapplets within Google Maps, to rendering them on a dedicated Mapplets page:

http://maps.google.com/maps/mapplets?moduleurl=http://www.google.com/ig/modules/geoscratchpad.xml

In conjunction with this transition the Google Maps Directory will be closed, and links to Mapplets will be removed from the My Maps tab in Google Maps.

Bookmarks for existing Mapplets will continue to work. They will be automatically redirected to the new Mapplets page for the relevant Mapplet. The Mapplets page also has the minimum necessary UI elements so that it is better suited to embedding in third party sites using an iframe.

However because the Mapplets page is not part of the Google Maps application, Mapplets will no longer have access to Google Maps user profiles, which means that User Preferences will no longer be stored between sessions. Users accessing Mapplets will now always see the default behaviour when the Mapplet first loads.

The above changes will be made on or shortly after Wednesday December 8th 2010. If your web site recommends one or more Mapplets by linking to the Directory we recommend that you update your site to link directly to the Mapplets page, or embed the relevant Mapplets page in your site, as soon as possible.

Posted by Thor Mitchell, Google Maps API Product Manager

Introducing the Advocate Bios and Developer Events pages

We know that developers are always interested in learning about new APIs and best practices for existing ones. And, one of the best ways to learn is face to face interaction with an expert in the subject.

Your friendly neighborhood Google Developer Relations team members work everyday with the APIs you care about. We host, as well as attend, a number of events around the world to help as many developers as possible throughout the year. However, it hasn’t been easy for interested developers to find relevant events close to them.

We also realized that while many developers have met at least a couple of our Developer Advocates, it’s hard to tie an Advocate to their API expertise.

Enter the Advocate Bios and Developer Events pages.

The Advocates Bios page provides names, pictures and short descriptions of Developer Relations team members. You can filter them by what they work on and/or where they’re based out of.

The Developer Events page is a mashup of the Calendar and Maps APIs, running on an App Engine backend. Want to know about upcoming Android events in Prague? Or whether Patrick Chanezon is speaking at the GDD in Munich on Nov 9th? (He is!) You can do all of that and more with the Developer Events page.

Both the bios and the events pages are conveniently linked under the Developer Resources section on the Google Code home page.

We hope to see you at the events!

By Peng Ying and Swapneel Kshetramade, Google Developer Relations Team

Happy birthday: Google Maps API Turns 5!

Today is an important milestone here at Google and we’re all pretty excited - the Google Maps API turns 5! It was five years ago today that we posted a brief announcement to let the world know about the JavaScript Maps API and now 5 years later more than 350,000 active websites make use of it. Uses have ranged from tools that have made it easier to find an apartment, track the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and even make an Earth sandwich! Many, many more examples have been chronicled on sites like Mashable and the Google Maps Mania blog.

In 2005, Adrian Holovaty launched the first crime mashup that overlaid Chicago’s public crime data onto online maps providing Chicago’s citizens and journalists with a true picture of crime in their city. The site won the 2005 Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism and was named by The New York Times as one of 2005's best ideas.

In honor of this very special birthday, we took a chance to check back in with Adrian to see what he thought about the journey of the Google Maps API over the past 5 years:

“Of my 11 years of doing Web development, Spring 2005 was the most interesting and exciting time. When Google Maps launched -- with maps assembled client-side, in JavaScript! -- I was one of the band of tinkerers around the globe who poked at Google's obfuscated code until we figured out how to embed their maps in our own pages. It was a ton of fun, not only doing the reverse engineering, but seeing the various discoveries and hacks other people were making: embedding multiple maps in a single page, swapping out the map tiles, using custom map markers, making markers move, loading real-time data onto maps... New discoveries were being made on a seemingly daily basis, and the best ones built on the other ones, which led to a sense of a community contributing to a greater understanding.

“These days, it's hard to fathom a Web without embeddable maps. Wasn't it always that way? To Google's eternal credit, instead of shutting these hacks down, they recognized the demand and legitimized it in the form of their mapping API.

“And the rest is... well, kind of boring in its simplicity, now that reverse engineering isn't involved. There was something raw and pure about those original hacks, like hunting and skinning your own food, living off the land, a digital self-sustainability. I feel like an old man yelling at kids to get off my lawn: ‘Back in my day, I had to reverse engineer Google's obfuscated JavaScript to get embeddable maps on my pages!’ You don't know how good you have it.”

The Google Maps API has seen some significant milestones of its own during the past five years. Some of the announcements we’re most proud of are the Maps API for Flash, Static Maps API, our Enterprise offering Maps API Premier, and the new Maps API v3, built with mobile use cases in mind and recently graduated from Code Labs.

The Google Maps API has established itself as the most popular Google API and the most deployed service-based API on the web. We continue to be amazed by how popular this API continues to be for web and mobile apps being developed today. This ProgrammableWeb dashboard shows that of the apps built and submitted over the past 2 weeks, a quarter of them make use of the Google Maps API. Click the 'All Time' tab and you'll see that nearly half of the almost 5000 cataloged mashups use it.

Today, on this 5 year milestone, we really have all of you to thank for this incredible chapter in web and mapping development. The remarkable levels of innovation, creativity and interest have come from all of you. You saw the possibilities the Google Maps API held and what it could be combined with to create, and you built it. Now join us to celebrate! Keir Clarke from Google Maps Mania has created a mashup that we want all of you to contribute to. Please tag your Google Maps mashup or tool to the map wherever you are:



Since we can’t all share a giant cake, I think it’s fitting that we all build a giant mashup of mashups to mark this special API birthday. We’re looking forward to the next 5 years of mapping innovation together with all of you!

Posted by Mike Pegg, Google Maps API team

Code for My Tracks is now yours

A year ago, we released My Tracks, an Android app that lets you track activities like hikes, bike rides and trail runs using your mobile device. Now we’re announcing the release of the My Tracks source code into the wild.

What this means to users: My Tracks will become even better. The collective intelligence of the development community will create a more powerful, more intuitive, more useful, and more robust My Tracks. In addition, complementary apps will be written (For details on third party app development, see the wiki documentation). Applications for fitness activities, geocaching—heck, even dog tracking—are not hard to imagine.

Open-sourcing My Tracks also means that bug tracking is now public. Go to the "Issues" section of the My Tracks Code site to see what is being actively developed and to file your own feature requests/bugs.

What this means to developers: You can now contribute code directly to My Tracks to improve it, fix a bug, or add a feature. We don't promise that all changes will become part of the My Tracks codebase, but cleanly coded, useful contributions have a darn good chance. If you’re feeling adventurous (and slightly masochistic), file and fix bugs for unreleased--and probably buggy--versions of My Tracks, to improve overall quality and stability. Note that for all contributions, we have a code review process—see the wiki for more information.

How non-coders can contribute: Translate My Tracks! If you'd like to translate My Tracks to your language, or fix a translation that is incorrect, please let us know at mytracks-dev@googlegroups.com and we'll explain how to do it. We'll soon post documents explaining the process, on the My Tracks wiki.

All development-related discussions will occur on the mytracks-dev@googlegroups.com list (but please don't post coding-related questions there).

This is an exciting new track for My Tracks. Jump in!

Posted by Sandor Dornbush and Rodrigo Damazio, Software Engineers for My Tracks

Styled Maps and wrapping up I/O in style

Thanks to everyone who made Google I/O 2010 a success! We always look forward to this event each year as a chance to speak one-to-one with developers from the Maps and Earth API ecosystem and this year did not disappoint.

Last week at Googe I/O, we made several announcements about updates to our tools for geo developers. I wanted to give you a closer look at one of those updates -- Styled Maps for the Google Maps API v3. You now have more control over how to style the base map within Google Maps API implementations. Styled Maps gives you the ability to change and customize various features of the base map, like changing the color of the water or removing roads altogether. This new styling feature gives you full control to display and customize the parts of the map that lets your data on the map shine. Take a look at this Styled Map Wizard and make the map your own!

If you want to watch this announcement or any of our other sessions, stay tuned to the Google I/O Geo session pages where we’ll soon be posting full video from each talk, including complete presentation materials. We’ve also put together a photo album to recap some of the highlights from our time at I/O:

A big thank you to these 16 companies who met with developers to share their experience in implementing Google Maps and Earth APIs in interesting ways!

Posted by Mike Pegg, Product Marketing Manager

Mark your calendars for Google Code Jam 2010!

If you're reading this post, we know your passion is coding. You thrive when given the opportunity to tackle a challenge, and enjoy the rush of applying your knowledge and creativity to approach a problem. Once solved, there's nothing like the satisfaction that comes from knowing you've accomplished something great.

That's why we are excited to announce Google Code Jam 2010 to the true die-hard coding fans. Google Code Jam, powered by Google App Engine, is our annual programming competition, where thousands of coders around the world attack algorithmic problems in several 2.5-hour online rounds. If you make it through the first four rounds, you'll be flown to our on-site finals, to be held for the first time at the Google office in Dublin! Once there, you will compete with 24 other top coders for the $5,000 first prize -- and the coveted title of Code Jam champion.

We don't want you to miss out on any of the action, so we are announcing some important dates for Google Code Jam 2010. Mark your calendars:

Wednesday, April 7, 2010 | 19:00 UTC | Registration Begins
Friday, May 7, 2010 | 23:00 UTC | 24-hr Qualification Round Begins
Saturday, May 8, 2010 | 23:00 UTC | Registration Deadline & 24 hr Qualification Round Ends
Saturday, May 22, 2010 | 1:00 UTC | Online Round 1: Sub-Round A
Saturday, May 22, 2010 | 16:00 UTC | Online Round 1: Sub-Round B
Sunday, May 23, 2010 | 9:00 UTC | Online Round 1: Sub-Round C
Saturday, June 05, 2010 | 14:00 UTC | Online Round 2
Saturday, June 12, 2010 | 14:00 UTC | Online Round 3
Friday, July 30, 2010 | Google Office - Dublin, Ireland | Onsite FINALS

In the meantime, visit the Google Code Jam site and try out some of the practice problems so that you'll be ready to go once we kick off the qualification round. Hope to see you in Dublin on July 30th!

By Igor Naverniouk, Software Engineer

Google I/O 2010: Now open for registration

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!

(Cross-posted with the Official Google Blog)

By David Glazer, Engineering Director

Welcome to Google Developer Relations, Don!

A couple days ago, Google welcomed Don Dodge to our Developer Relations team, where he joins us as a Developer Advocate working with developers, startups, and other Google Apps partners. We're expecting Don to be a fantastic addition to our team. He's already a prominent voice in the developer community, well-known and highly-regarded among entrepreneurs, technologists, and the media.

In the TechCrunch post first announcing Don's availability, Michael Arrington wrote how Don, "makes a big effort to give young startups the attention they deserve. This is a guy who gives a heck of a lot more to the community than he ever takes back." This dedication to the community of developers and the businesses they build is one of the things that excites us the most about having Don on our team. These businesses have been central to Google's success over the years, so we already know that Don's attitude will fit right in with our efforts. Don has deep experience working in startups from his days at companies like AltaVista, Napster, and Groove Networks, and has always continued to maintain the connection and passion for that community since leaving their ranks to join Microsoft, and now Google. We are eager for Don to share his personal experience and professional insights with developers and small businesses integrating with Google Apps, and be an advocate for developers and partners inside the company.

Don already wrote about his first day on the job at Google. Tomorrow you can hear him speak on the Enterprise Cloud Summit Panel in New York City. You can follow Don on his personal blog, email him at dondodge at google.com, or follow @dondodge on Twitter.

By Michael Winton, Google Developer Relations

The Developer Sandbox, now with Video Interviews!

The Developer Sandbox was a new addition to this year's Google I/O. The Sandbox featured a diverse range of developers and apps, all with one thing in common -- they've all built applications based on technologies and products featured at I/O. The Sandbox was very popular with attendees and saw a lot of foot traffic throughout both days of the event. Sandbox developers welcomed the opportunity to interact with fellow developers, discuss their products and answer questions.



We interviewed these developers about their apps, the challenges they faced and the problems they solved, and finally their learnings & hopes for web technologies going forward. We also asked these developers to create screencast demos of their apps, much like the demos they gave to people visiting their station during I/O.

These video interviews and demos are now available in the Developer Sandbox section of the I/O website. Each developer has their own page with a brief description of their company, their app, and their interview video (if one was filmed) and screencast demo video (if available). For instance, here's a video interview with Gustav Soderstrom of Spotify, who walks us through a demo of their Android app and then talks about the platform and why Spotify chose to develop their app on Android.



Are you building an app on one of Google's platforms or using Google APIs? Please send us a video about your company and your app and you could be featured on Google Code Videos. Click here for the submission form and guidelines.

Each Sandbox developer page also features a Friend Connect gadget that allows anyone visiting the page to sign in with their Friend Connect id and leave comments & feedback. It's a great way to continue the conversation or to ask questions if you did not get a chance to meet them at I/O.

By Neel Kshetramade, Google Developer Programs

Post Google I/O 2009

We would like to thank the thousands of developers who joined us last week and made this year's Google I/O a wonderful developer gathering. We announced some of the things we've been working on and shared our thoughts on the future of the web. 140 companies joined us to showcase what they've been working on and talk about their experiences building web applications. We hope you left I/O inspired with new ideas for your own products. Our engineers were pumped to get your feedback and were inspired by what they learned from conversations at Office Hours, in the Sandbox, and during the After Hours party.

If you missed a session you really wanted to see at Google I/O, you'll be happy to know that over 70 of the sessions (videos and slides) will be made available over the next few days. For your convenience, you'll also be able to download those videos to view them on the go.

These will be going live soon at code.google.com/io. We'll be releasing I/O content in the following waves:

• Wed, June 3: Client (Chrome, HTML 5, V8, O3D, Native Client, and more)
• Thurs, June 4: Google Wave, Mobile/Android
• Fri, June 5: Tech Talks
• Mon, June 8: Google Web Toolkit, App Engine, Enterprise
• Tues, June 9: AJAX + Data APIs, Social

You can check out some of our favorite Google I/O photos here. In addition, check out video interviews with the 3rd Party developers featured in our Developer Sandbox, and see how they've implemented products & technologies represented at I/O.

We've gotten many inquiries about the opening video for the Day 1 keynote. The video is comprised of different Chrome Experiments and the soundtrack music and lyrics were created by our very own Matt Waddell. Lastly, wondering why the Lego character on the Google I/O t-shirt is holding a spray can? For those of you who have t-shirts, turn off your room light and see what's written on the back of the green brick :)

Stay tuned for more updates on Google I/O!

By Azhar Hashem, Google Developer Products

Google I/O 2009: registration is now closed

Google I/O has sold out and general registration is now closed. If you have received a registration code, you can still register here. If you're unable to join us next week, we will post all of the videos and presentations shortly after I/O -- keep an eye out for updates on that. During the event, you can follow us on the @googleio Twitter account and on the Google Code Blog for the latest in-conference updates and announcements. And if you're coming to Google I/O, we look forward to seeing you there!

By Azhar Hashem, Google Developer Team

Who's @ Google I/O - spotlight on the Social Web

Google is making the web a more sociable place by contributing to new standards and releasing new products that make it easy to integrate your website with the social web. We've invited a few friends that are helping build the social web to Google I/O so you can learn what's coming next and what it means for you.

Learn from successful developers
Social apps can grow up fast, and some have attracted tens of millions of users. We're planning sessions to help you understand the business side of social apps, and we'll have a panel where you can pick the brains of some of the biggest social app developers in the world.




Make some new friends
There's more to a successful social app than just a creative idea. From analytics to payment processing, there's a lot of code to write beyond the core functionality of an app. Luckily, companies have been springing up to fill the needs of this ecosystem. You can meet some of these new companies in the Developer Sandbox and see how their products can make your app better (and your life easier).




Meet the containers
One of the key benefits of OpenSocial is the incredible distribution it provides to app developers. Building your app on OpenSocial makes it possible to reach hundred of millions of users around the world. We've got sessions planned to let you meet the folks building OpenSocial platforms and learn more about what kind of apps work well in different social environments.




The next generation
IBM, Salesforce.com, Oracle, eXoPlatform, SAP, Atlassian - not who you'd expect to be speaking on an OpenSocial session. Speakers from these companies will come together to talk about how the enterprise software development community is bringing social concepts and technology like OpenSocial into the enterprise.

To see all the sessions we've got planned to help you learn about the social web, go to http://code.google.com/events/io/sessions.html, and search for 'social'.

*Keep up with the latest I/O updates: @googleio.

By Lane LiaBraaten, OpenSocial team

Ignite Google I/O speakers announced

As mentioned before, I will be hosting an Ignite at Google I/O on Wednesday, May 27 from 4:15-5:15pm at Moscone West in San Francisco. I'm happy to announce the following nine speakers who will be joining me onstage. In no particular order, here they are - as well as a preview of what they'll be presenting during their five minutes in the hot seat:

• Leo Dirac - Transhumanism Morality
  Why only geeks and hippies can save the world.


• Michael Driscoll - Hacking Big Data with the Force of Open Source
  The world is streaming billions of data points per minute. This is Big Data ? capital B, capital D. But capturing data isn't enough. We need tools to make sense of it, to help us better understand -- and predict -- what we click and consume. We want to make hypotheses about the world. And to test hypotheses, we need statistics. We need R.


• Pamela Fox - My Dad, the Computer Scientist: Growing up Geek


• Tim Ferriss - The Case for Just Enough: Minimalism Metrics
  Looking at how removing options and elements gets better conversions, etc., looking at screenshots of start-ups I'm working with and real numbers. Some humor (I hope) and fun, both philosophical and tactical.


• Nitin Borwankar - Law of Gravity for Scaling
  Why did Twitter have scaling problems? I spent 6 months thinking deeply about this and derived a simple formula that a high school student would understand. It demonstrates where the center of gravity is moving in the "Next Web" and why this aggregation of CPU's is even bigger than Google's. And oh yes, it explains how to build a service that scales to 100 million CPU's.


• Kevin Marks - Why are we bigoted about Social networks?


• Andrew Hatton - Coding against Cholera
  I'll examine what IT life is like on the front line with Oxfam, a humanitarian agency, and how good code can make a real difference to people's lives in all sorts of ways..some of them surprising..


• Robin Sloan - How to Predict the Future
  OK, back in 2004 I made a video called "EPIC 2014," predicting the future of media (and Google). It turned out to be 100% CORRECT. No, just kidding. But it made a lot of people think, which is really the point of talking about the future. Turns out there's a whole professional discipline of future forecasting. And there are certain ways you can think about the future that will give you better odds of being right than others.


• Kathy Sierra - Become Awesome

Posted by Brady Forrest, O'Reilly Radar

SVG Open 2009: “SVG coming of age”

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is starting to pop up over all the place. It's showing up natively in browsers (including Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome and more). It's natively supported on the iPhone, and work is happening in various open source communities to create options for Internet Explorer. Google uses it under the covers in Google Maps (to create vector line drawings showing where to go); Google Docs (for drawing into presentations); and more. Wikipedia has a huge repository of SVG images, while many tools such as Inkscape, Illustrator, and Visio can either export to SVG or work with it natively. Vector graphics support through SVG and Canvas is consistently one of the top voted requests by developers.

Since we use and support SVG we thought it would be great to work with the community to host the SVG Open 2009 conference this fall. SVG Open will be in Mountain View at the Google campus from October 2-4, 2009. The theme this year is "SVG coming of age".


We are looking for contributors to present papers or teach courses. Presenters are asked to submit an extended abstract in English with an approximate length of 400 to 800 words by May 15. The abstracts are reviewed by a reviewing committee and presenters will be informed about acceptance on or before June 26. If your abstract is accepted, you will be asked to submit your full paper by August 31, according to instructions that will be sent to you.

Come and join us in the fall at SVG Open!

By Brad Neuberg, Open Web Advocacy Team

Submit a Talk for Ignite Google I/O

Ignite is a series of geek nights started by Brady Forrest of O’Reilly Radar and Bre Pettis of Makerbot Industries that has since spread around the world. The nights combine a Make contest (like a popsicle stick bridge-building contest) and a series of fast-paced, short-form tech talks. To check out past Ignite talks, view the videos at http://ignite.oreilly.com/show.

At Google I/O, we'll be doing a one hour Ignite on the first day of the conference (May 27). In typical Ignite fashion, these talks will each be 5 minutes long with 20 slides and only 15 seconds a slide (they auto-advance). We want to hear your cool ideas, hacks, lessons, and "war stories". What do you want to talk about?

We're looking for speakers to participate, so if you're interested in submitting a talk, sign up via the form below.

Submit your talk for Ignite Google I/O

Submission Deadline: May 11th
Speaker Notification (rolling): May 12th

We’re taking submissions from everyone — whether this is your first time or whether you’ve done an Ignite talk before. Once we've chosen the speakers, we'll be sharing who they are after May 12. Stay tuned!

Guest Post by Brady Forrest, O'Reilly Radar

Lombardi Blueprint: Client side code, server side execution with GWT

This post is part of the Who's @ Google I/O, a series of blog posts that give a closer look at developers who'll be speaking or demoing at Google I/O. Today's post is a guest post written by Alex Moffat, Chief Engineer - Blueprint, Lombardi Software

Lombardi has been using Google Web Toolkit (GWT for short) since January 2007 to build Lombardi Blueprint, an online, collaborative business process modeling and documentation tool. The client part of Blueprint is completely written using GWT and runs in any modern browser, that is IE6 and anything later, such as IE7, IE8 or Firefox. One of the biggest advantages of Blueprint is that it's easier to learn and quicker to use than a pure diagramming tool like Visio and it's more effective because it's focused on process mapping.

One of the things we do to make Blueprint more effective is automatic diagram layout. This allows the user to focus on describing their process instead of worrying about object positioning and line routing. You can see this in action in the video below as objects are added to the diagram.



Remember, this is JavaScript compiled by GWT from Java code, but it's as fast as, or faster than, anything you could write by hand, compact, and much, much, easier to maintain. The ability to use the excellent tooling available for Java is one of the great advantages of GWT.

One of the goals for our automated layout routines is to generate a flow diagram that looks like it was produced by a human. When the algorithms don't get it quite right, Blueprint also supports hinted layouts so that the user can drag and drop hints about where one object should be positioned in relation to another. Working out what the final layout should be and where the lines should go for large diagrams can be computationally expensive.

Modern browsers have very fast JavaScript engines. For these systems, there are no problems. However, we still need to support the browsers our customers use, which may not necessarily be the fastest or most up-to-date.

This is where GWT gives us a unique benefit. We can implement our algorithms in Java and compile this implementation twice, once with GWT to produce JavaScript to run on the client and once with javac to produce JVM bytecode to run on the server. This lets us use the much faster JVM if we need to without having to create, and maintain, separate client and server layout implementations. There's no other toolkit that makes this possible, never mind easy.

Blueprint client code continuously measures how long it takes to perform the layout and routing operation in the browser. If this exceeds our threshold value, then the code dynamically switches to trying a server side layout. We call the server code with GWT and the data structures returned, via the GWT serialization mechanism, are of course the same ones produced by the layout when executed on the client. The time required for a server layout is also measured, which includes both the execution time and any network delays so we account for the different connection experiences people have. After the first server layout, Blueprint chooses whichever method, client or server, has the lowest average elapsed time. I'm still amazed by how easy this was to implement.

Damon Lundin and I will be talking at Google I/O this year about how we built Blueprint, both what we do technically with GWT to get high performance and how we organize development so that we can make the most effective use of GWT. We look forward to meeting fellow GWT developers in person!

By Alex Moffat, Chief Engineer - Blueprint, Lombardi Software

Google I/O: Hurry up and register! Discounted registration ends May 1

Heads up, early registration for Google I/O ends May 1. After this Friday, the rates increase $100 and even worse, you'll lose out on your Google Chrome Comic book.

Google I/O will feature 80+ sessions that cover Android, HTML5, App Engine, Chrome, AJAX APIs as well as special sessions for Enterprise and Social app developers. These technical sessions will be led by engineers from Google and a wide range of developers from the community. We'll also have Fireside Chats and Office Hours, giving attendees a chance to meet with Google engineers and get answers to all those pressing questions.

This year's newest addition to Google I/O is the Developer Sandbox. Over 100 developers representing a wide range of companies and apps will be on hand to demo their products, which they built using Google technologies. We've announced a few thus far and will continue to announce more over the coming weeks here on the Code Blog.

We've also worked really hard to make your visit to the San Francisco Bay Area as affordable as possible, including lower-than-usual hotel rates. Those rates expire on May 4 so register and make your hotel reservations today to secure them. For more information visit the Google I/O website.

If you plan to attend, register before the fee increases. We look forward to seeing you at I/O!

By Azhar Hashem, Google Developer Products

Who's @ Google I/O - spotlight on Google Web Toolkit

Google Web Toolkit, or GWT for short, recently went live with their 1.6 release, which also included a Google plugin for Eclipse and integration with App Engine's Java language support. Google I/O will be rich with GWT content, including a number of sessions on improving productivity and app performance with GWT. In addition, there will be a number of external GWT developers leading some of these sessions and/or part of the Developer Sandbox.

As mentioned last week, we're giving you a closer look at developers who'll be presenting or demoing at I/O. Here is a taste of these GWT developers below. (New to GWT? Check out this overview)

• JBoss, a Division of Red Hat
  JBoss is well-known by developers for their enterprise open source middleware. Red Hat developer communities such as the Fedora Project and jboss.org have collaborated with Google on a number of developer initiatives over the years including Google Summer of Code, Hibernate Shards, integration with Drools and the Seam Framework and Google Gadgets integration with JBoss Portal. JBoss will be present at the Developer Sandbox.
  


• Timefire
  Timefire produces highly scalable, interactive visualizations of up to millions of data points for business intelligence, analytics, finance, sensor networks, and other industries in what they like to call "Google Maps, but for the time dimension." Their platform's built on Google Web Toolkit from the ground up, but also runs natively on Android. Timefire also uses App Engine's new Java language support for their social charting tool, Gadgets, OpenSocial, GData, Google Maps, GViz, YouTube Player API, and Protocol Buffers. Ray Cromwell will be at the Developer Sandbox as well as speaking on 2 sessions - Building Applications on the Google OpenStack and Progressively Enhance AJAX Applications with Google Web Toolkit and GQuery
  


• StudyBlue
  StudyBlue is an academic network which enables students to connect with each other and offers study tools. StudyBlue's website is built entirely with GWT. According to StudyBlue, GWT allows for complete AJAX integration without sacrificing usability or integration capabilities. StudyBlue will be at the Sandbox.
  


• Lombardi Blueprint
  Lombardi Blueprint is a cloud-based process discovery and documentation platform accessible from any browser. They've used GWT since early 2007 to write the client side of Lombardi Blueprint. GWT has enabled Lombardi to focus on writing and maintaining their Java code, while taking care of creating the browser-specific optimized AJAX for them. Alex Moffat and Damon Lundin will be at the Developer Sandbox as well as leading a session, Effective GWT: Developing a complex, high-performance app with Google Web Toolkit. (Check out Alex Moffat's video about Lombardi's use of GWT)

Finally, one little known fact - a number of Google products were developed with the help of GWT. This includes Google Moderator, Health, Checkout, Image Labeler, and Base.

Don't forget - early registration for Google I/O ends May 1. This means $100 off the standard list price (and a copy of the Chrome comic book). To register, check out the latest sessions, or see more developers who'll be presenting at I/O, visit code.google.com/io.

*Follow us for the latest I/O updates: @googleio.

By Christine Tsai, Google Developer Products