March 2007 - Posts
We have been working on some new ways to help you quickly create applications, mashups, websites and scripts using GData services. Part of this initiative is to make our developer's guides more relevant and helpful to developers programming applications in different languages. To that end, we've updated the
Google Calendar Developers Guide with more use cases and samples for all of the developer languages we support, including Java, .NET and PHP. The new
Google Calendar Developers Guide allows developers to view information specific to each programming language. Each language-specific guide shows you how to accomplish a common set of operations in the language and provides a reference to downloadable source code which can be used to execute the sample methods.
Of course, GData at its heart remains a simple ReST-based protocol based upon open standards like HTTP and the Atom Publishing Protocol draft, so your data is always universally accessible. You're always free to access GData services using plain HTTP, or write a client library in the language of your choice.
We hope to soon build out the documentation for the rest of our GData services in a similar manner. Please let us know if you have comments or suggestions about our documentation.
See you in the groups!
Happy coding,
- Ryan Boyd, the GData team
Google Base, a service that allows you to submit all types of content and make it searchable via Google, is a great way to showcase your content and drive traffic back to your website. From cars to recipes to real estate and more, relevant content may appear in Google web search results, on Google Maps, and on other Google properties. Google Base also offers a
free and open search API, which gives the public the opportunity to search for and discover the content you have published.
The Google Base team understands that some providers want more fine-grained control over how their content is syndicated via the Google Base API. While we believe that content providers are normally best served by continuing to allow public syndication, we also want to enable providers to opt-out when required. To that end, we're pleased to introduce a new API syndication attribute that gives providers control over exactly which items are syndicated via the API.
To read more about how to use this new attribute, please see the
API Syndication Attribute help content.
- Clay Bavor, Google Base Team
I'm very pleased to announce the latest client library for GData services: the (...drumroll please...) Python client library! Because the GData protocol is built upon standards and draft standards such as HTTP, Atom and the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP), Python developers have long been able to take advantage of the vast array of GData services including Google Base, Google Calendar, Google Spreadsheets, Blogger and more. However, in keeping with
Google's mission, we wanted to make it even easier!
We've included code to help you get started with the Google Base Data API, Google Spreadsheets Data API, and Google Calendar Data API and more APIs are on the way. There's also a foundation which should be usable in any Atom or Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) project. The library is open source, and hosted on Google Code under the name
gdata-python-client. If you are interested in using or contributing to the project, feel free to join the
discussion group on Google Groups. I'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas for improvements to the library. Happy coding!
-Jeff Scudder - The GData Team
We are excited to announce the new release of GData Java client library. This release integrates support for
Google Picasa Web Albums API and
Google Apps Provisioning API . This library is available for download from the
Google Data API client library download page.
Please let us know if you have questions or suggestions on how to improve our client libraries.
- Prakash Barathan, Google Data API team.
The Picasa Web Albums team is pleased to announce the release of the newest member of the GData family, the
Picasa Web Albums data API.
Head on over to the
Google Code Blog to read the full announcement, and to the Picasa Web Albums data API group to
tell us what you think.
Sven Mawson - The Picasa Web Albums Team
As Google Reader has grown, so has its engineering team. As the newest member of the Reader team, I am excited to be working with all of the great people who spend their days making the world a better place for reading feeds. I originally started working on Reader as an intern during the summer of 2006. That experience was a ton of fun and a great way to learn. Working as an intern also allowed me to work with people who are some of the best in the tech industry. After that experience I was very happy to come on full-time. For those of you who are interested in looking into the internship program you can find information here: Internship Information. Google is always looking for the best and brightest engineers. Who knows, you might even get to work on Reader.
During a recent planning session, we realized we had never taken a group picture. So I whipped out my Canon Digital Rebel and the result is below. From left to right, in order, we have: me (Brad), Mihai, Susan, Kevin, Steve, Nick, Chris, Ben and Justin.
So now there is evidence that we were all in the same room at least once.
Over the past few months, I've seen some great applications that use
the Google Base API. It seems like quite a few developers have begun
leveraging the massive amounts of data that Google Base makes
available. Here are a couple of my personal favorites.
Semantic SearcherSemantic Searcher provides an interface to browse or search
through the items in Google Base. What I like most about
Semantic Searcher is that it displays the Google Base query in the search box.
Each query generates a two-column results page with information
from the snippets feed on the right and the attributes feed on
the left. If you click on one of the attributes, the attribute
value pair is added to the query and you can see how to build up
detailed queries using the query language. It's a great way to learn
how to construct API queries. Kudos to Paul for creating an app that
is both educational and useful.
GumiyoThis website turns your mobile phone into a platform for listing
classifieds. The ability to browse listings on the go from your phone
and set up alerts to notify you of new items that match your query
makes this application a winner in my book. I'm eager to see what else
Shuki will come up with.
And More...There are quite a few great apps out there that I haven't mentioned,
and they cover everything from finding concert tickets to job postings
to real estate. You can see some more examples of mashups using
Google Base on
Programmable Web or on the list of
Google Base sample apps.
These applications get me excited, but I think the Google Base API still has
a great deal of untapped potential. Perhaps these projects have
sparked an idea and you'd like to learn more about the API. If so,
check out the
demo page and
get started.
If you are interested in other GData APIs be sure to check out the
GData homepage on Google Code for updated news and information about Google's data APIs.
Jeffrey Scudder - The GData Team