WindowBuilder becomes new open source project with major code contribution to Eclipse Foundation

When Google acquired Instantiations in August 2010, everyone knew about our Java Eclipse products. Shortly after we joined, we talked about how best to help developers now that we are part of Google. We have always wanted to get these tools in more developers’ hands. So, back in September we decided to give them away for free! The community response has been fantastic. With that done, we asked ourselves, how could we make a good thing even better? How about by open sourcing the code and creating two new Eclipse projects!

Today we are announcing Google’s donation of the source code and IP for two of these products to the open source community through the Eclipse Foundation. This donation includes WindowBuilder, the leading Eclipse Java GUI Designer, and CodePro Profiler, which identifies Java code performance issues. Specifically, the WindowBuilder Engine and designers for SWT and Swing. All in all, this is a value of more than $5 million dollars worth of code and IP.

The Eclipse Foundation’s Executive Director, Mike Milinkovich, states that, “this is clearly a significant new project announcement, and very good news for Java developers using Eclipse. It has been impressive to see the continued growth and popularity of WindowBuilder, as this product has always filled a much needed gap in the Eclipse offerings. We look forward to it appearing in an Eclipse release soon. We’re very pleased with Google’s generous support of Eclipse, and the Java developer community around the world.”

One of the exciting aspects of innovating in the open source arena is that customers benefit from a full community. We are very excited to see the diverse collection of companies and individuals that have already expressed an interest in contributing to these projects. Commercial level support is important to many customers. Genuitec, makers of MyEclipse, intends to offer commercial support for the various WindowBuilder based products including the SWT, Swing Designer and even the GWT Designer from Google. Please sign up on the Genuitec site for more information. Similarly, OnPositive intends to offer commercial support for CodePro Profiler, as well as lead as the committers on the Eclipse Community Project. Sign up on the OnPositive site for more information.

"Genuitec is pleased to offer commercial support for WindowBuilder-based products - Swing, SWT and GWT - in early 2011 for companies who wish to continue a paid support contract once their Google support expires. We've been involved with the Eclipse Foundation since the beginning, so we are very familiar with these products. Thus, providing commercial support for this product line is a natural fit for us," said Maher Masri, President of Genuitec.

“Over the years OnPositive has built up unique experience with the CodePro Profiler and we are excited to offer commercial support for it. Google’s donation ensures that Java developers can build faster applications,” said Pavel Petrochenko, President of OnPositive.

WindowBuilder
WindowBuilder is regarded as the leading GUI builder in the Java community (winning the award for Best Commercial Eclipse Tool in 2009). It includes powerful functionality for creating user interfaces based on the popular Swing, SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit), GWT (Google Web Toolkit), RCP and XWT UI frameworks.

CodePro Profiler
CodePro Profiler is an Eclipse-based Java application profiling tool that helps developers identify performance issues early in the development cycle and find CPU and algorithmic bottlenecks, memory leaks, threading issues, and other concurrency-related problems that can slow down an application or cause it to hang.

Both WindowBuilder and CodePro Profiler will become Eclipse projects in the first half of 2011. Once each one is set up as a project and available for download from the Eclipse site, the products will be accessible to use as open source code under the the standard Eclipse license. I am looking forward to leading the WindowBuilder project.

If you have any questions, you can learn more at this FAQ or we look forward to hearing from you on the forums.

By Eric Clayberg and the Google Developer Tools Team

Student Applications Open for Google Summer of Code 2010

Want to work on a cool open source project, hone your development skills with the help of a dedicated mentor, and get paid? Look no further - student applications are now open for Google Summer of Code™ 2010.

Since its inception in 2005, the Google Summer of Code program has brought together nearly 3,400 students and more than 3,000 mentors from nearly 100 countries worldwide - all for the love of code. Through the program, accepted student applicants are paired with a mentor or mentors from participating projects, thus gaining exposure to real-world software development scenarios. They also receive an opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits. And best of all, more source code is created and released for the benefit of users and developers everywhere.

Full details, including pointers on how to apply, are available on the Google Open Source Blog.

By Leslie Hawthorn, Google Open Source Team

The latest addition to Google's open source projects

Did you know Google has released more than 300 open source projects to date? Yesterday, we announced the latest addition to Google's open source projects - YouTube Direct, a new tool that enables any developer to solicit video submissions, moderate and display them on their website, all powered by YouTube. We recognize the role that open source plays at Google and how it helps us create better applications and we try to give back to the community as much as possible.

YouTube Direct was built on top of YouTube's public APIs and is designed to run on Google App Engine - Google's highly scalable platform. To date, several media organizations like ABC News, The Huffington Post and Politico have taken advantage of the open platform to deploy their own version of YouTube Direct to empower citizen journalism and enrich their site in the process. We look forward to see for more creative usage of the tool.

By Amanda Surya, YouTube Direct team

Go: A New Programming Language

Have you heard about Go? We released a new, experimental systems programming language today. It is open source and we're excited about sharing it with the development community. For more information, check out the Google Open Source blog.

By Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Ian Taylor, Russ Cox, Jini Kim and Adam Langley - The Go Team

Google I/O Interactive Map: Now with videos + some Open Source goodness!

If you attended Google I/O 2009 a few weeks ago, you may have noticed a kiosk station on the 2nd and 3rd floors of Moscone West labelled 'Interactive Conference Map, powered by Google Maps'. The kiosk simply pointed to a JavaScript Maps API-based interactive map of the venue I created in my 20% time.

Now that all the I/O session videos and presentations are live, we took the opportunity to mash up the videos with our interactive conference map to provide developers with an alternate way to navigate through 80+ keynote and session videos, and bring the action at I/O to life virtually. For example, here are videos of sessions that took place in Room 1 (click the tabs for Wednesday and Thursday sessions). And here's where the keynote sessions took place. Check out where we filmed interviews with I/O sandbox developers on their apps, technical challenges and business best practices.


Now, hopefully you enjoyed using the map and are now thinking, "Cool, I want to do something like this for my next event!" (or your college campus, or such). If you are, then good news everyone, I've open sourced the interactive conference map and all relevant resources. Inside the project, you'll also find a how to article outlining the steps I went through to create the map.

If you attended I/O, then I hope you enjoyed it and had time to stop by the conference map kiosk! If not, no worries, just make sure to check out the open source project and see if you can use the code and/or techniques in your next mapping project!

By Roman Nurik, Developer Programs Engineer

Mercurial Now Available to All Open Source Projects

About a month ago we announced Mercurial support for early testers. Today, we are happy to announce that all Project Hosting users can create a new Mercurial project and convert their existing projects from Subversion to Mercurial. 

We also want to thank the projects that helped us test support for Mercurial. Projects like Clojure-Dev and Spice of Creation helped us discover new usage patterns and fix several unforeseen issues. Unlike our mature Subversion implementation, there are still a few issues/features that we are working on. 

We therefore encourage everyone to be familiar with what is supported before picking Mercurial.

Please let us know if you have any feedback or find any issues. If you're coming to Google I/O, be sure to come meet us in person and hear our talk about Mercurial on Bigtable this Thursday at 3:45pm-4:45pm in Moscone West - Room 5. We have Mercurial SWAG!

By Ali Pasha, Google Code Team

Mercurial support for Project Hosting on Google Code

We are happy to announce that Project Hosting on Google Code now supports the Mercurial version control system in addition to Subversion. This is being initially rolled out as a preview release to a few invited users on a per-project basis, so that we can iron out the kinks before making this available to the general public.


Mercurial, like Git and Bazaar, is a distributed version control system (DVCS) that enables developers to work offline and define more complex workflows such as peer-to-peer pushing/pulling of code. It also makes it easier for outside contributors to contribute to projects, as cloning and merging of remote repositories is really easy.

While there were several DVCSs that we could support, our decision to support Mercurial was based on two key reasons. The primary reason was to support our large base of existing Subversion users that want to use a distributed version control system. For these users we felt that Mercurial had the lowest barrier to adoption because of its similar command set, great documentation (including a great online book), and excellent tools such as Tortoise Hg. Second, given that Google Code's infrastructure is built for HTTP-based services, we found that Mercurial had the best protocol and performance characteristics for HTTP support. For more information, see our analysis.

If you would like to help us launch Mercurial and to try out the features as an invited user, please fill out the following form. We are currently looking for active projects with more than two users that are willing to try out Mercurial and work with us to identify issues and resolve them. For projects that plan on migrating from Subversion, see our conversion docs for the steps required for this process.

Our implementation of Mercurial is built on top of Bigtable, making it extremely scalable and reliable just like our Subversion on Bigtable implementation. For more information on our Mercurial implementation, we will have a TechTalk at Google IO that will be led by Jacob Lee, one of the core engineers working on Mercurial support. Let us know if you plan on attending and we'll give you access to Mercurial ahead of the talk.

By David Baum, Software Engineer

Improvements to Google Checkout Module for osCommerce

At Google Checkout, we're constantly striving to improve our usability. That's why we've recently simplified and improved the installation and configuration process for the osCommerce Google Checkout module. osCommerce is a popular open-source e-commerce solution and the module is an open-source project hosted on code.google.com.

We've completely reworked the installation process by no longer requiring users to manually copy and paste large swaths of PHP code into their files. Instead, we've created an automated deployment app (shown below) that does this for you. This should ease concerns about lines of PHP getting copied into the wrong place. If you want to learn more about the installation process, you can take a look at our documentation, which contains a step-by-step walkthrough with screenshots showing exactly how it works.


For more details, check out our post on the Checkout blog. We're excited about the improvements to the osCommerce Checkout module. If you're using osCommerce, we invite you to give Checkout a try and share your feedback with us.

By Ed Davisson, Google Checkout Team

Code Conversations Episode 1 - Chris DiBona on Google's Open Source Programs

By Neel Kshetramade, Google Developer Programs

"Code Conversations" is a new series of videos intended to film casual conversations with notable Google developers and legends in the technology field. No agenda, no topic... just thoughts. This video is the first episode of this series, in which Chris DiBona, our intrepid open source programs manager talks to Stephanie Liu of the Developer Team about his "sweet goatee" in the Chrome Comic. He also explains why Google open sourced Chrome and Android and why we didn't do it sooner. He also touches on why much of Google's software isn't open sourced.

Intros:

Chris DiBona is the open source programs manager at Google, where his team oversees license compliance and supports the open source developer community through the release of open source software projects and programs such as the Google Summer of Code. Before joining Google, Chris was an editor at Slashdot, has edited the books Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution and Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution and formerly co-hosted the FLOSS weekly with Leo Laporte. His personal blog is called Ego Food.

Stephanie Liu is a Programs Manager on the Developer Team here at Google.



We'll be checking your comments on this post for feedback and ideas for future Code Conversations.

Staying up to date with Google Code

By Ali Pasha & Jacob Moon, Google Code

As the number of developers and projects have grown on Google Code, we've started thinking about how to get projects to learn from and work with each other. Today, we're happy to announce that we have made a few steps towards that goal.

First, we've added user update streams to make it easy to see what a particular user has been doing across Project hosting on Google Code. As an example, take a look at Ben Collins-Sussman's activities on his profile page. Ben works on Google Code, but it's obvious that he has other interests as well.

In addition, tracking open source projects and other developers is as easy as starring a project or a developer profile. Starring a project or developer adds a link in your new "Starred Projects" and "Starred Developers" section of your profile page, making it really easy to find those projects or developers again. Starred projects are also added to the new "My projects" drop-down, which makes it easy to navigate to a project from anywhere on the site.

Once a project or a developer is starred, all updates from starred projects and developers can be tracked by looking at your personalized updates.

For those that prefer to use their feed reader, use the following new feeds:

• Updates for a user - http://code.google.com/feeds/u/{username}/updates/user/basic
• Developers a user is tracking - http://code.google.com/feeds/u/{username}/updates/projects/basic
• Projects a user is tracking - http://code.google.com/feeds/u/{username}/updates/developers/basic

As always, we look forward to your feedback.

New! Caption files for Google Developer Videos

by Naomi Bilodeau, Google Code Team

Last year, YouTube launched a Captions and Subtitles feature. In addition to launching a new playlist for captioned Developer Videos, we're also kicking off an Open Source project to host caption files that anyone can reuse under the terms of the Creative Commons 3.0 BY license.

We're hoping that developers will come up with interesting uses for caption data, once it's in the public domain. You can use transcripts as a corpus for training speech-to-text algorithms or testing applications that read and write caption files. Or, combine timepoint data with YouTube's URL support to jump to a specific point in a video.

Caption tracks make YouTube videos accessible to a wider audience. For example, try a search on [RESTful protocol YouTube] and you'll find search results from the captions on Joe Gregorio's recent talk.

While we're delighted that Kevin Marks' captioned English accent can be more easily understood by Americans, we've also translated the caption files and provided tracks in multiple languages for a few of our captioned videos. For all other videos, YouTube can perform Auto-Translate on caption text using Google Translate technology.



To learn more about YouTube caption file formats, take a look at the YouTube Help Center. If you're interested in contributing caption files for videos on Google channels, or making translations available, please consider joining the project.

We hope you'll find these additions useful. Happy reading!

Happy holidays from Google Code!

By Matt Hansen, Google Developer Programs

At Google Code, we are getting into the holiday spirit early. To thank open source developers for their support, I'm happy to announce that we are giving every project on Google Code a whole lot more quota!

We're increasing the maximum file sizes from 20MB to 40MB, Subversion quotas from 100MB to 1GB, and download quotas from 100MB to 2GB.

Happy holidays!

P.S. If you need more space, let us know!

Increased code search coverage, now with Git and Mercurial support

By Ali Pasha, Google Code Search

At Google Code search, we've seen distributed version control systems get more popular. Linux has been using one for several years and several large open source projects have migrated to using one in the last few years. In recognition of that, we are now announcing that we crawl Git and Mercurial repositories.

For Git, we now crawl repositories hosted by several public git hosting sites including GitHub and repo.or.cz. In addition to that, we also crawl Android, Chromium and Linux code.

• Github.com: ruby package:github.com
• Android: AbsListView package:android
• Linux: FD_CLR package:/git.kernel.org
• Chromium: MessageLoop package:chromium.org
  

For Mercurial repositories, we now crawl most popular open source repositories including Mozilla, JDK, and NetBeans.

• Mozilla: class:nsCOMArrayEnumerator package:hg.mozilla.org
• JDK: java.util.concurrent package:hg.openjdk.java.net
• NetBeans: javax.swing.JFrame package:netbeans.org
  

Finally, we have also extended coverage to support Codeplex: System.ServiceModel package:codeplex.com

Feel free to provide feedback to let us know how we're doing.

Native Client: A Technology for Running Native Code on the Web

By Brad Chen, Native Client Team

Modern PCs can execute billions of instructions per second, but today's web applications can access only a small fraction of this computational power. If web developers could use all of this power, just imagine the rich, dynamic experiences they could create. At Google we're always trying to make the web a better platform. That's why we're working on Native Client, a technology that aims to give web developers access to the full power of the client's CPU while maintaining the browser neutrality, OS portability and safety that people expect from web applications. Today, we're sharing our technology with the research and security communities in the hopes that they will help us make this technology more useful and more secure.

At its core, our release consists of a runtime, a browser plugin, and a set of GCC-based compilation tools. Together, these components make it possible to build applications that run in a web browser but incorporate native code modules. To help protect users from malware and to maintain portability, we have defined strict rules for valid modules. At a high level, these rules specify 1) that all modules meet a set of structural criteria that make it possible to reliably disassemble them into instructions and 2) that modules may not contain certain instruction sequences. This framework aims to enable our runtime to detect and prevent potentially dangerous code from running and spreading. We realize that making this technology safe is a considerable challenge. That's why we are open sourcing it at an early stage: we believe that peer review, community feedback, and public scrutiny greatly improve the quality of security technologies like this one.

While it's a big challenge to secure Native Client, we believe that the ability to safely run fast native code in a browser has the potential to provide benefits to users and developers. For example, imagine that you run a photo-sharing website and want to let your users touch up their photos without leaving your site. Today, you could provide this feature using a combination of JavaScript and server side processing. This approach, however, would cause huge amounts of image data to be transferred between browser and the server, leading to an experience that would probably be painfully slow for users who just want to make a few simple changes. With the ability to seamlessly run native code on the user's machine, you could instead perform the actual image processing on the desktop CPU, resulting in a much more responsive application by minimizing data transfer and latency.

To learn more and help test Native Client, please visit our developer site. There you can read our documentation and the Native Client research paper, browse the source code, and download the research release. The release contains the experimental compilation tools and runtime so that you can write and run portable code modules that will work in Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Google Chrome on any modern Windows, Mac, or Linux system that has an x86 processor. We're working on supporting other CPU architectures (such as ARM and PPC) to make this technology work on the many types of devices that connect to the web today.

Once you've gotten your bearings, please report any bugs you find (especially security bugs) using our issue tracker, and join our Google Group to share your thoughts on the technology. We look forward to your feedback!

Code Search: Improved browsing and new search operators

By Dmitry Barashev, Google Code Search Team

Software engineers who work with huge code bases always wish searching thousands lines of code and navigating through the file and code structures was easier. They may use powerful IDEs for the local sources on their development workstations, but until recently they have been unable to efficiently browse huge amounts of the open source code in repositories and archives on the Internet. The latest Google Code Search updates add a few features that improve code browsing and searching. The first one is Code Outline which shows you the structure of code written Java, C, C++, C#, Python, JavaScript and Pascal. You can find it under a new "Outline" tab next to the existing "Files" tab.

The second feature we added allows you to click on include and import statements in Java, C, C++ and Python code and jump directly to the included file, if it is in the same package. In the case where the included file comes from a third-party library or, say, from Linux headers, a search is performed for the included file in the indexed code base.

But what if the include list is too large and you can't guess where a class or method is defined? To help we added two new search operators, class: and function: which allow you to restrict your regular expression to the names of classes and functions only. Together with the package: operator and new radio button "Search in ..." that restricts search to the files from the specified package, these are powerful ways to find exactly what you are looking for. Compare the results of searching for "Shell" in the whole code base with the results of searching for class:Shell inside SWT.

We continue improving Code Search and look forward for your feedback at our discussion group.

Protocol Buffers, our serialized structured data, released as Open Source

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

One of the core pieces of infrastructure at Google is something called Protocol Buffers. We are really pleased to be open sourcing the system, but what are these buffers?

Protocol buffers are a flexible, efficient, automated mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages. You can even update your data structure without breaking deployed programs that are compiled against the "old" format

It is probably best to take a peak at some code behind this. The first thing you need to do is define a message type, which can look like the following .proto file:

message Person {
  required string name = 1;
  required int32 id = 2;
  optional string email = 3;

  enum PhoneType {
    MOBILE = 0;
    HOME = 1;
    WORK = 2;
  }

  message PhoneNumber {
    required string number = 1;
    optional PhoneType type = 2 [default = HOME];
  }

  repeated PhoneNumber phone = 4;
}

There is detailed documentation on this language for you to learn more.

Once you have defined a message type, you run a protocol buffer compiler on the file to create data access classes for your platform of choice (Java, C++, Python in this release).

Then you can easily work with the data, for example in C++:

Person person;
person.set_name("John Doe");
person.set_id(1234);
person.set_email("jdoe@example.com");
fstream output("myfile", ios::out | ios::binary);
person.SerializeToOstream(&output);

We sat down with Kenton Varda, a software engineer who worked on the open source effort, to get his take on Protocol Buffers, how we ended up with them, how they compare to other solutions, and more:

Using Git with Google Code Project Hosting

By Benjamin Lynn, Google Developer Programs

Git is a popular member of the latest generation of version control systems. Learn why at our Open Source Blog, where we show how to use Git with Google Code Project Hosting.

Introducing Google Doctype

By Mark Pilgrim, Google Code Team

The open web is the web built on open standards: HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and more. The open web is a beautiful soup of barely compatible clients and servers. It comprises billions of pages, millions of users, and thousands of browser-based applications. You can access the open web with open source and proprietary browsers, on open source and proprietary operating systems, on open source and proprietary hardware.

Google has built its business here, on the open web, and we want to help you build here too. To that end, we are happy to announce the formation of an encyclopedia for web developers, by web developers: Google Doctype.

In its current (beta) form, Google Doctype contains dozens of articles written by top Googlers on topics important to all web developers: security, performance, caching, DOM manipulation, CSS styling, and more. It contains over 8,000 lines of JavaScript code: Google's own battle-tested JavaScript library, released today under a liberal open source license. And it contains the beginnings of a test-driven reference of the open web: a reference of every element, every attribute, every DOM method, every CSS property, all backed up by test cases.

Well, not quite every property; at least, not yet. We're still working on filling in a few of the details about the world's largest development platform ever, and we need your help. And so we humbly offer this fledgling encyclopedia under a Creative Commons Attribution license, and we invite the web developers of the world to contribute to it. Sign in with your Google account and edit any page, any article, anywhere. Create new ones, update old ones, and help expand the world's understanding of the open web.

Come on over, the Open Source Programs Office has its own blog

By Chris DiBona, Open Source Team

When we first launched code.google.com (webarchive), it was largely a site for documenting our open source activities and had some details about Google's supported APIs and file formats. In the ensuing 3 years, code has grown to encompass protocol documentation, project hosting and even a mobile operating system. Similarly, the activities of the Open Source Team have grown from simple license compliance to the aforementioned hosting, releasing massive amounts of code and introducing student programs like the Summer of Code and its high school cousin, the Highly Open Participation Contest. Since we've grown so much, we felt it was well past time to spin off a blog that specifically covers the open source activities of the company. So that's just what we've done. Come check it out, and if you like, subscribe!

Compiere: Building a GWT interface for opensource ERP

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

The Compiere team is trying to make ERP easier. I had a chance to catch up with Gary Wu, Di Zhao and Chris Sprague of the Compiere engineering team. We talked about their recently shipped open source ERP solution that now includes a GWT-based rich internet interface.

Using GWT was natural for the developers and allowed them to create a highly productive web experience for Compiere users in just a few months of effort. Listen to the Compiere developers discuss their experiences with GWT and see a demo of the new Compiere Web user interface.