Jingle Bells

Exciting things are happening around Google Talk today. First, Jabber has published the experimental draft Jingle specs, which extend XMPP for use in voice over IP (VoIP), video, and other peer-to-peer multimedia sessions. You can read more about that from Jabber or go straight to the specs:

JEP-0166: Jingle Signalling
JEP-0167: Jingle Audio

Second, we've released an open-source library we're calling 'Libjingle' on SourceForge. Libjingle is a set of components provided by Google that let your programs interoperate with Google Talk's peer-to-peer and voice calling capabilities. The package includes source code for Google's implementation of Jingle and Jingle-Audio. Check out the Libjingle site for more information about that and for details on how to download and implement the code.

We're also proud to have given a donation to the Jabber Software Foundation as a show of our support. They've been doing some great work and we are happy to have the opportunity to support them.

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Google Releases Homepage API

Congrats to our friends who created the personalized homepage -- today they released an API that lets you create modules that people can add to their Google homepage. It allows for pretty interesting modules by letting you wrap your existing web content, apps, or mashups, and the development team will be reviewing all the modules submitted.

For more information, check out the Google Homepage API page and be sure to join the Google-Homepage-API Google Group. You can also take a look at the module directory that includes some modules the team created to help get the ball rolling.

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Summer of Code Student Profiles in Doctor Dobb's Journal

Want to know a bit more about what some of the students did during the Summer of Code? Doctor Dobb's Journal has profiled a number of them in what will be a multi-month feature. The first and second installments are up on their site. Thanks to Dr. Dobbs for this.

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Heading to ApacheCon

If you're going to be in San Diego the week of December 10th, our own Greg Stein and Brian W. Fitzpatrick will be heading down to attend ApacheCon 2005. They'll both be around for the week, and Fitz will also be giving a Tutorial on Subversion on Sunday. Greg is the Chairman of the Apache Software Foundation and Fitz is a V. P., so feel free to bend their ear if you have any questions about Google and Open Source!

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Google Sitemaps, ajaxslt, Maps, Firefox updates and more...

It's been a busy couple of weeks here at Google. First off, the Sitemaps team has updated their interface to give you better information about the Sitemap derived crawl, so check that out. Also, there are a whole whack of new Sitemaps programs on the Third Party page, including a plugin for Drupal and others.

On the Ajaxslt front, Steffen has updated and pushed out a new version 0.4 of that library, which you can find on SourceForge.

Googler Jonathan has released a wicked cool Firefox extension that allows you to label your Firefox windows with better mnemonic titles that better reflect the use of that tab. Firetitle can be found on the Mozilla.org site. Works great with Firefox versions up through 1.5b2. Check it out!

Finally the maps team has put up a team blog centered around the API, so subscribe to that with your reader, if you like.

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Google Donates to Oregon State/Portland State Open Source Lab Efforts

In Oregon today, we participated in a press conference announcing our contribution of $350,000 to a joint open source technology initiative of Oregon State University and Portland State University. With the grant, the universities will collaborate to encourage open source software and hardware development, develop academic curricula and provide computing infrastructure to open source projects worldwide.

Scott Kveton and Bart Massey have both done terrific work to date and we're happy to be able to help them continue creating more open source developers, code, and infrastructure. I've asked them to provide us the odd post now and then to tell us how it is going.

The Google Blog has a link to the Governor's press release and some other details about the donation.

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Summer of Code Map and Results

As the remaining awards are being distributed and the t-shirts are being prepped to ship out, we thought we'd give you an idea of the both the global scope and the hard work done by the students and mentors during the Summer of Code. We've put together a map and a list of projects for your examination. Please note that not all of the projects are listed quite yet, but we wanted to share some info with the people who follow this site.

Thanks to all the students and mentors who worked so hard on making this effort succeed!

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Google's Adam Bosworth to speak at Zend/PHP Conference

Our very own Engineering VP Adam Bosworth will be giving a keynote address at the upcoming Zend / PHP Conference, taking place in San Francisco from October 18th to 21st. The conference theme is "Power Your Business with PHP". You can hear Adam's keynote along with addresses from Marc Andreessen, Zend co-founders Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, as well as executives from IBM, Oracle, Intel, and many more. In addition to keynotes and sessions, the conference will also feature tutorials, certification, and a party continuing the celebration of the 10th Anniversary of PHP.

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Hacking Maps on XML.com

XML.Com has a pretty great 3 page maps howto up on their site. Check it out if you are interested in maps related stuff. It gives some solid information on how to handle geocoding to latitude and longitude using the excellent (and free!) Geocoder.us database.

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Summer Of Code Update - Pencils down!

We wanted to drop a line about how the Summer of Code is coming along. September 1^st was pencils down and that is when we began the process of taking in surveys from the mentors and students to find out how they did. We've taken in a great number of evaluations from both mentors and the students. Early results are looking pretty terrific, with a greater than 88% of the students succeeding in meeting the goals of their projects. We've sent the first batch of payments into accounting and we're pretty happy with how things have gone so far. More to come!

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Google Talk is Developer Friendly

As you may have heard, we've released our IM/Voip system Google Talk into beta. Talk uses XMPP for its communications protocol, and the team has a document outlining how to use a standard Jabber client to communicate with Google Talk. This makes for a very nice programmatic interface for IM. There are interfaces in multiple languages, including Python, PHP, Java and C#, and the Jabber Software Foundation maintains a healthy list of libraries on their site. We hope you enjoy our developer-friendly Google Talk.

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New Adwords PHP Client Libraries

The Adwords team has released a new way to interface with their APIs via PHP. Previously, our client libraries were available in only Java, so we wanted to make it easier for those developers who prefer PHP. You can check out the APIlity code on SourceForge.

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Feed Me, Seymour...

For those of you who have been waiting for the ability to subscribe to feeds from Google News, I'm happy to say you can now do just that. For instance, if you are a chess fiend, you could subscribe to all the chess related news with http://news.google.com/news?q=chess&output=rss. Alternatively, if checkers is more your style, then you could use http://news.google.com/news?q=checkers&output=atom as the feed. Both RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 are supported, so you shouldn't have any trouble consuming these feeds.

Topic feeds (like entertainment, sports, or technology) are also available. Read more about it and let us know what you think.

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Google O'Reilly Open Source Awards Presented at OSCON

At the Tuesday night extravaganza Google and O'Reilly announced the winners of the 2005 Open Source Awards recognizing terrific work done in the open source development and advocacy community. The point of the awards was to recognize extraordinary individuals in the following catagories: Communicator, Evangelist, Diplomant, Integrator and Hacker. Winners were awarded a very nice plaque and five thousand US dollars. See the O'Reilly OSDir site to find out who won. Congratulations!

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Fun Maps Hacklet: Link-Labels

I traded some email with the Maps team and I saw something in a link they sent me that I wasn't familiar with. To best explain this, first load this map from Berkeley to Google in a separate browser window. Note in the "End Address" section, the Google. Now load this map of Sydney and note the label inside the callout.

If you look at the urls, you'll see a (text) argument appended to the url. This is a lightweight way of linking to Google maps without touching on the maps API. As you can see, you can arbitrary labels to your links like this chocolate shop or this restaurant. Have fun!

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New Papers On Labs

There have been a fair number of papers published on Google technologies. At conferences, most people I've met have read the paper on which Google was founded, but the ones on GFS and MapReduce are lesser known. If you're interested, most Google research papers are posted here.

I want to highlight one in particular: Rob Pike's recent draft submission "Interpreting the Data: Parallel Analysis with Sawzall," which was submitted to Scientific Programming Journal's Special Issue on Grids and Worldwide Computing is quite interesting. If processing vast amounts of data is your thing, you may want to check it out.

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VLC, Patches, and Mirrors

We've made a small change to the patches page in response to your feedback. There's now a page of sample videos, and the full patched source tarball of VLC that we build Google Video's player from. We've also put the Google Search Appliance distribution and kernel mirror online, so as to best comply with the GPL. You can find links to all of these on the patches page.

In what we think is an insanely cool development, we've gotten word that VLC has taken that patch and is integrating elements of it into VLC. You can see the changeset on their site. Thanks to the VLC team, you folks rock.

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Google Earth KML Documentation and Tutorials Posted

A lot of people have expressed interest in adding data to Google Earth, so we're happy to now have documentation and a tutorial about the KML file format it uses. The folks on the Keyhole BBS have done some amazing work and we wanted to help them continue to invent.

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Google Releases Maps API for External Use

I'm very happy to let you know that our friends who have created Google Maps have released an API so that you can post interactive, draggable, zoomable, maps (with satellite imagery) on your personal websites.

For more information, check out the Google Maps API page and be sure to join the Google-Maps-API Google Group. A huge congratulations to the maps team for doing this.

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Summer of Code Participants Chosen

As mentioned earlier, we're able to involve 410 students in this year's Summer of Code. We've sent out letters of congratulations to those people, and we hope everyone will join us in congratulating them.

It's unfortunate we weren't able to include more of the almost 9,000 applications -- there were so many students that the mentoring organizations would have liked to work with. We hope to continue Summer of Code in upcoming years, and if we're able to do so, we hope to hear from all of you again. Thanks for all your hard work!

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Sparsehash and Perftools Updated

We've updated both Sparse Hashtable and Perftools, mostly to fix a bug or two that showed up in different distributions. If you have not checked out these tools before, and are into C++ and threads, be sure to do so, they're quite useful.

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New Project: AJAXSLT

AJAXSLT is an implementation of XSL-T in JavaScript, intended for use in fat web pages, which are nowadays referred to as AJAX applications. Because XSL-T uses XPath, it is also an implementation of XPath that can be used independently of XSL-T.

Please see our projects page.

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New Project: AdWords API Java client library

The Java client library for the AdWords API makes it easier to write Java clients to programmatically access AdWords accounts. The client library is provided in a single jar file that contains all the Apache Axis jars and pre-compiled stub classes needed to write Java clients.

Please see our projects page.

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We're Expanding the Summer of Code...

After spot reviewing the applications we've received for the Summer of Code, we were struck with their high quality. As a result, we were able to increase the funds available to support 400 students, double our original number of 200. While this doesn't allow us to take all applicants, we thought that this would be a terrific thing to do for the mentoring organizations, the students, open source software and computer science.

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Application Deadline Reached for Summer Of Code!

We are no longer taking applications for the Summer of Code. Google and the mentoring organizations will now take on the job of selecting 200 participants from the over 8700 applications to the program. We are (literally!) overwhelmed with terrific applications and want to thank everyone who applied, we wish we could accept everyone.

Approval and rejection letters will be sent out over the next 10 days. Because of the volume of applications that we must process we cannot send a personal rejection letter for every application.

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Sitemaps Third Party Goodness and a Summer of Code Update

We're very happy to be putting up the first of what we hope is a growing list of those who are using Google Sitemaps in interesting ways. If we are missing your work and would like us to add it to the list, let us know about it.

We also wanted to give a short update on the progress of the Summer of Code. We've passed over 5400 applications for the 200 slots currently available, and we're seeing some very good quality applications! The application deadline is June 14th, so if you haven't applied and you want to, be sure to do so before then.

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Google Sitemaps Launches

Today, Google launched Google Sitemaps, a new service designed for webmasters that enables them to automatically submit their web pages to Google. It is meant to provide Google with more information about web content so we can improve search results for users worldwide. As part of this launch, we're releasing Sitemap Generator, an open source tool that generates an XML sitemap for a few simple use cases and thus shows developers how to create these files programmatically.

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Summer of Code Update

The Summer of Code sure is something. The response from the open source community and, more importantly, future open source developer community has been very positive. I wanted to thank everyone involved so far. So...Thanks! We've added a few more FAQ questions and things are humming along nicely. If you are 18 or older, and a student, and you haven't checked it out, you should!

As a side note, our friends at O'Reilly Media have put up a very cool article on how the Kongulo desktop plugin works. Check it out!

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Summer of Code Update: New organizations and More FAQ Entries

We are -extremely- pleased with the number of applications and interest the Summer of Code has received. We've added over 20 mentoring organizations and a bunch of faq entries. Check it out! Serious stuff.... GAIM, OpenOffice, NMAp, FreeBSD, Drupal, Fedora Core...Something for everyone!

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Announcing The Summer of Code

We're very excited to launch our newest initiative, the Summer of Code. This program aims to help students enter into the world of Open Source software development. This Summer, allow Google to help you hone your skills on real problems with real programmers. Return to school with some real experience under your belt and some cash in your wallet. By working with some of the most important organizations and foundations in Open Source we think we've put together a program that benefits Open Source, students and computer science. Read more about it and consider taking part!

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New Gmail Feed Types and A Python GDS Plugin

I'm very happy to announce that the Gmail team has made a nice tweak to their atom feeds, you can now pull feeds based on Gmail label. For instance, if you have a label named "lkml" related to your favorite mailing list and you want to know when something is posted there, you can simply subscribe to https://gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom/lkml. More info can be found in the Gmail help center.

Also, we have a new project that we're releasing. This is the first API example we're releasing here on Google Code. In keeping with our love of Python, we are releasing the Kongulo Google Desktop Search plugin. Kongulo is a spider for GDS that makes it easy to crawl sites behind your firewall. Our hope is that people might use it as a template for implementing new plugins for GDS. The Kongulo Python source can be found on SourceForge.

Happy Coding!

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GSA API Docs added to Code.Google.Com

We've added three documents to our repository here on Google Code, each having to do with the Search Appliance. All three can be found off the APIs list. These documents specify:

Appliance Search Protocol: This allows customers to work with the search results from the appliance.
Feeds Protocol: This allows customers to write a custom connector to feed data into the appliance.
Authorization Protocol: This allows a customer web service to authorize users to access specific documents for searching in real-time, leveraging their existing security and access control environment.

These were previously accessible to appliance customers but we wanted to move them onto Google Code.

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New project: Google mMAIM

We're releasing a new Open Source project today: Google mMAIM, the MySQL Monitoring And Investigation Module.. mMAIM's purpose is to make it easy to monitor and analyze MySQL servers and to easily integrate itself into any environment. It can show Master/Slave sync stats, some efficiency stats, can return statistics from most of the "show" commands and more! We look forward to seeing what you think about the project!

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Find us at the MySQL Users Conference

Googlers will be attending and speaking at the MySQL users conference. As we did for the Python Conference, we're going to note our impressions of the talks we attend on http://mysqluc05.blogspot.com. If you are attending, come introduce yourself, we'd love to meet you.

Chris DiBona

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Regarding the FSF and our New Featured Project

Hello again everyone! The featured project this week is a Tcl binding for coredumper, our library which we're happy to see is finding an enthusiastic following among developers. Check it out. We've also added the Free Software Foundation to the list of organizations that we are members of.

Also, we were discussing TCMalloc today and it struck us that we may not have adequately explained its utility. TCMalloc (part of perftools) is very good with C++/multi-threaded programs, but it also works quite well with pure C programs too, so if the C++ nature of the library has been deterring you from using it, don't let it! Happy coding!

Chris DiBona

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Meet us at PyCon

If you happen to be in the DC area for PyCon, Greg Stein will be giving a talk on 'Python at Google' at 9am on Friday and other Googlers will be in attendance as well. Look forward to seeing you in DC! It's a terrific conference and we're posting our impressions on pycon.blogspot.com.

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Google Code Progress Report

It's been a week since we launched Code, and I wanted to share some things with you. First, some metrics: in our first 24 hours we had just under 10,000 downloads of the software projects from SourceForge.net, and our first patch arrived within hours.
We received a good number of bug reports as well for platforms/configurations that the software wasn't tested on, so that was exciting too. It is my impression that we're doing well interacting with developers on the lists. There are a few things that I wanted to ask people to remember when developing with us:

Please submit bugs and patches via the SourceForge tracker.

For those of you submitting ideas for featured projects, please know that these must have something to do with either Google or the projects we've released.

Please submit general questions and such to the discussion mailing list, not to code@google.com Also, thanks so much for the many terrific featured project submissions.

Chris DiBona

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Developer Tools Released

If you head on over to the projects page, you'll find links to a number of projects over on SourceForge.net. They are:

perftools: different libraries and tools to help tune and debug your multi-threaded c++ programs.
coredumper: Gives you the ability to dump cores from programs when it was previously not possible.
goopy/functional: brings functional language behaviors to python.
sparsehashtable: brings a variety of new hash tables to C++.

Each has a Google group that you can participate in and we hope you find them as useful as we do!

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What are Featured Projects?

One thing we really wanted to put up on Google Code was a way of bringing recognition to those people and groups who have created programs that use our APIs or the code we have released. If you have one that you'd like to nominate, let us know via code@google.com.We're going to feature a new one every week or so and we'll send a fabulous, always fashionable, t-shirt to the maintainers as a small way of saying thank you! You can subscribe to the featured application feed in your favorite aggregator as well, in case you want to see what kinds of new software is being written.

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Welcome to Code.Google.Com

Welcome to Code.Google.com! I'd like to welcome everyone to the site! Look around, and please join our discussion group. If you like and are using a feed aggregator, we have two feeds that you can subscribe to: This one (updates) and the featured program, in which we pick a great app that uses some Google tool or api.

If you are a C++ developer, you really owe it to yourself to check out the code we've released. Each project also has a google group you can join as well.

Chris DiBona - Open Source Program Manager

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