Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 18 June 2008 14:58
Opinion and Analysis
Page 6 of 7
I asked Stocky what he might predict for Google Developer Day in 2009. Stocky said that was a tough question to answer.
Stocky said that a lot of what makes developer products complex and interesting is being really responsive to what they come up with. What are the biggest and hardest problems for developers to solve, he asked?
Stocky said that the Google App Engine was a direct response to Google’s own developer challenges - even with their own great infrastructure.
With things such as web apps that can have flaky connections or can go offline and stop working – it’s “hard to anticipate what will be the next tools and products” and that “we will be responsive to what developers want.”
Stocky said that “Google is just one player, and that what makes this platform so unique is that it’s not owned by a single company. There’s no one company telling you what to do – it’s all of us that are collaborating and determining the future together.”
In asking about the Flash Maps API, I asked if there was any direct partnership with Adobe. Stocky said that the Flash Maps API team was based in Sydney, so he didn’t have complete visibility into the team, but that Google’s main focus was on AJAX programming and Javascript.
However Stocky said that Google understood that developers like to develop in a range of environments, like Flash or Flex with actionscript, and that’s why they created the API.
So then I asked if Google might do something similar with Microsoft’s Silverlight. Stocky said that the “AJAX API’s one is AJAX search API – there’s API’s for news, viode and Youtube, blog, web search results... also there’s a visualisation APUI, a feed API” and that Google had launched ‘REST’ versions of that.
Stocky said that “RESTful versions means you can access it from a Flash app, Silverlight, a server side app etc – we do try to be responsive to the fact developers might develop in a lot of apps”
Asking what REST and RESTful models were, Stocky said “the idea is kinda what the web is built on. Any API can be accessible though an HTTP request. In the URL I might have some query terms to be passed to the API” which can pass information back. He said that the RESTful modem is not tied to a specific platform, so it can be accessed by just about anything else.
I asked what format the data is in, was it XML, was in independent? The data could be XML but Google was using ATOMPub, which is similar to RSS, but instead of being a one-way mechanism as RSS is, ATOMPub is a two-way mechanism that lets you read and write data, update and delete it.
An example might be of you, the user, making a booking with a travel site. If you have given that travel site permission, it could then send you the booking details – and automatically publish those dates for travel right into your calendar.
Please read on to page 7.
