[Stefan Lorimer guest-blogs from Google Developer Day 2007. Here is his summary of the keynote.]
Speakers included VP of engineering Jeff Huber, Google data API product manager Paul McDonald, Google Maps and Local Search product manager Thai Tran and Sergey Brin. The keynote speech was broadcast to 10 global cities with 5,000 developers worldwide participating in the conference.
The speech was broken into three major sections: 1) Integrate Google services, 2) Reach Google users, and 3) Build next-gen web apps. Each section featured a product announcement.
For the Integrate section the product announcement was the Google Mashup Editor. It was discussed that AJAX, Javascript, Atom, RSS, caching and parsing on the server were all involved in the process of making mashups. Mashup Editor provides a Sandbox for testing and taking feeds from external sources and creating mashups in as few as 3 lines of code.
There is at this point also the mention of the Gadgets API, which is used in Google homepages for widgets and now will be able to be added in websites. It was also mentioned that ***Gadgets can be added to blogger blogs****. I want a gadget on my blog of a mashup of Frank Taylor’s Google Earth Blog and Stefan Geens Ogle Earth. [:-)]
Next product announcement is Google Mapplets which lets you combine Maps API with Google Gadgets API. This functions by way of an iframe that contains a gadget that inputs data into Google Maps. As a side note, try to implement a Flash app in one of these for some extra bang for your buck. Check out this preview to try it out.
Lastly, there was a mention of Google Web toolkit and the current limits of AJAX.
Picking up on this topic, a new product announcement: Google Gears is demoed, which gives developers offline access for web apps. It is billed as cross-browser, cross-platform and open source, with an evolutionary approach towards working with industry standards. This enables developers to keep using skills that would be based around previous tools such as Javascript API.
It was also brought up that Google Reader would now be functional offline.
Next up an announcement is made of the Gears Industry Collaboration between Adobe, Opera and Firefox. A demo of Flex and Google Gears is given.
[Stefan Lorimer also posted a YouTube video of some new features coming soon to Google Earth:
And here is one of Sergey Brin:
Personally, I’m amazed at how much that was presented at the Keynote has a geospatial component or application. Thanks, Stefan L.!]