Google Developer Courses on YouTube

By Stephanie Liu, Google Developer Programs

Wow, it's been nearly 4 months since we started the Google Developers channel on YouTube! We wanted a place to post talks, announcements, interviews, and anything else that might interest outside developers (and other fans). Now, we're building out more tutorial / lecture content -- something that hobbyists and seasoned programmers can watch to get their feet wet with our products.

We know that one of your New Year's resolutions must be to learn a new API, so check out our first videos on Gadgets and Google Data:

Three videos about Getting Started with Gadgets by "the Dans" (Daniel Lee and Daniel Holevoet):


An Introduction to Google Data by Jeff Fisher:


We're just getting started, so subscribe to the Google Developer Courses playlist for updates. There are many ways for you to keep up to date:

You can subscribe through YouTube by clicking the "Subscribe" link here:
http://www.youtube.com/profile_play_list?user=GoogleDevelopers.

Or, add the playlist directly into Google Reader or iGoogle:


Finally, you can also put the Google Data feed into your reader of choice: http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/playlists/A930398A6117E70C

Let us know what you think! If there are any particular tutorials you'd like to see, post a comment below.

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Google Data Ideathon

By Stephanie Liu, Google Data APIs Team

The Google Data team is holding a local event for developers Thursday, December 13th, 5:00pm-10:30pm at the Googleplex (Mountain View, CA). It'll be part hackathon, part unconference, part user group, part food, and part fabulous prizes.

Besides a short kick-off session, everything else will be up to you. We'll provide the wi-fi, power and food, and you can utilize the time however you want -- whether it's to pick the brain of someone on the GData team, meet other local developers, hack away on your current project, sit in on impromptu sessions about things like GData + Gears and GME, or hold your own lightning talk about the project you're working on.

Head over to the GData blog for the full announcement and the event page to RSVP and for more info.

Hope to see you there!

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Blogger GData JavaScript client library released with offline Blogger client example

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

Near the end of September we announced the release of a new GData JavaScript client library that allowed you to do full read-write access to Google Calendar from JavaScript.

We now have another service for you to have at. A GData JavaScript client for Blogger has been released, which means that you can now do richer mashups with blog content.

We sat down with Ryan Boyd and Pamela Fox to discuss the release and delved into some of the sample applications that have already been written. They include:

• A tool that takes your upcoming Calendar entries and creates blog posts of the events
• A code snippet that you can add to your website that enables visitors to your site to click on a link to comment on your content on their own blog
• Code that allows you to search blogs on various topics, find entries, and again allow users to comment on their own blog

Pamela also worked on Blog.gears, a Blogger client that works offline using Google Gears. She took some time to take a peak at the architecture behind the application, and then walked us through the application itself.

If you have ever wished that you could do writable Blogger mashups without the need of proxy code on your own server, take a peak at the new client library, and listen in:

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New GData JavaScript library enables full read and write access for your mashups

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

I am really excited to see the release of the GData JavaScript Client Library for Calendar that allows you to do a lot more with Calendar GData mashups.

Developers have been able to work with our GData feeds from JavaScript for over a year, but only in a read-only capacity. There are plenty of mashups that can be done that way, but what if you want an application that ties into personal content? What if you would like to write an Ajax client that can create, update, or delete entries as well as read it?

Now you can. This release allows you full read-write access to Google Calendar from JavaScript. Instead of requiring server-side proxies to do this for you, AuthSub is fully supported from within the pure JavaScript client.

You can login by doing something similar to:

function logMeIn() {
 scope = "http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds";
 var token = google.accounts.user.login(scope);
}

function setupMyService() {
 var myService =
   new google.gdata.calendar.CalendarService('exampleCo-exampleApp-1');
 logMeIn();
 return myService;
}

I got to sit down with Jun Yang, who worked on this code, and got his take on the new library:



Armed with this new functionality, I can only imagine how the mashups will become richer. I can't wait to see them!

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Google Developer Podcast Episode Eight: The world of Google data APIs

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

Mark Stahl is a technical lead on the Google data APIs team. Many of the APIs that Google offers are part of the Google data API family, so we thought it would be prudent to get some time to chat with him, and discuss all things GData.

Using iTunes?

If you are new to GData, or want to learn more, listen to the podcast to hear:

• What "Google data API" actually means (the parts and pieces)
• What Atom, Atom Publishing Protocol, and other tech behind GData are all about
• What GData adds to the mix on top of Atom and APP
• How Atom compares to RSS
• What are ETags? And how can they help me?
• Why REST, the style, was chosen for these APIs
• Where REST makes sense, and where it doesn't. Resource driven vs. RPC.
• What the first GData APIs were
• How the killer app of syncing data with Google Calendar
• How you actually use the APIs? What do they need to learn? What tools do we give them?
• Can you write APIs that implement the same GData APIs?
• And much more.

You can download the episode directly, or subscribe to the show (click here for iTunes one-click subscribe).

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YouTube: Now with GData Goodness

By Stephanie Liu, Google data APIs Team

YouTube is the latest service to join the GData family. Now you can search through YouTube's index and get detailed video, user, and playlist information in the form of GData feeds. If you haven't built something with YouTube yet, now's a great time to get started! Here are some examples to give you ideas.

Search through the index for new 'puppies' videos (I subscribe to this query, doesn't everyone?):
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/videos?vq=puppies&orderby=updated

Search through lonelygirl15's videos for the season finale (maybe you missed it, or just want to relive the drama):
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/users/lonelygirl15/uploads?vq=season+finale

List all of NBC's playlists:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/users/nbc/playlists

Ooh! They have a Heroes playlists (I love Hiro):
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/playlists/E0E4BC86E9D0ACB3

The full list of functionality can be found in the reference guide on our new home on code.google.com.

For the old-school YouTube developers, the migration guide has info on switching over, including the upgrade timeline (you'll have at least a year).
Head over to the YouTube API Announcement Blog for the rest of the details.

I'm looking forward to seeing new faces in our developer forum - feel free to stop by with questions or feedback.

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Recapping the Atom Publishing Protocol interoperability meetup

Posted by DeWitt Clinton, Google Developer Programs

Google had the privilege and pleasure of hosting the first-ever Atom Publishing Protocol interoperability meetup earlier this week in Mountain View, CA.

The Atom Publishing Protocol is a specification that helps define the interactions between clients and servers that wish to read and write collections of documents via the web. Building upon the popular Atom Syndication Format, the Atom Publishing Protocol formalizes many of the mechanisms required for the exchange of rich and meaningful content via a process known as Representational State Transfer, known familiarly as REST. Nearing completion as an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard, the protocol is already seeing wide adoption, and the working group felt it was time to bring people together to see how the various existing implementations interacted with each other.

Over 20 representatives from organizations and companies far and wide (some hailing from all the way across the Pacific) made the trip to Mountain View for two days of interoperability testing. The meetup was open to anyone who has built client or server software that uses the protocol, and it was extensively blogged about and "simulcast" over the Atom IRC channel for those who could not attend in person. Striking was the diversity of both the organizations in attendance (AOL, IBM, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, O'Reilly, Six Apart, to name just a few) and the wide variety in types of applications being built. And a special thanks to Tim Bray, co-chair of the Atom Publishing Protocol working group, for his tireless devotion to the standards process and for leading the group in making the most of our time together.

And for the curious: how did Google's many implementations of the protocol do at interoperability? Well, authentication was a hurdle for most clients (the specification itself considers authentication to be an orthogonal concern), but beyond that our servers are relatively compliant and some of our client code is well along the way to full support for the protocol. Perhaps more importantly, Google is committed to continued support of the working group, and we intend to keep pace with the draft specifications as they are finalized.

Overall we felt the meetup was a great success and we are honored to be a part of a community that is building something that is likely to be an important piece of the fabric of the Internet.

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Google Macintosh group announces Objective-C library for Google data APIs

Posted by Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

We are always excited to see new libraries come about that enable developers to easily access our Google data services. Today, the Google Macintosh group has released an Objective-C Google data APIs library that does just that for all Objective-C developers.

Greg Robbins, Software Engineer in the Google Macintosh team, wrote about the release:

I created a framework to use Google data APIs directly in Objective-C programs. We are using the framework for our application development, and today we are making the framework available to all developers. The Google Data APIs Objective-C Library joins MacFUSE and Breakpad as open-source development efforts of Google's Mac software team, hosted at code.google.com.

Google Calendar, Google Base, Google Spreadsheets, and generic Atom feeds like Blogger are supported now in the framework, with access to more services already in development. If you are a Mac developer, I hope you'll join the open-source project and help us make even more Mac applications Google-savvy.

I look forward to seeing slick, beautiful, Apple application UIs that are backed by Google APIs.

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GData for Picasa Web Albums

Posted by Sven Mawson, Picasa Web Albums 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.

Now you can access your albums, photos, comments and tags through a common GData API. Have a great idea for integrating your photos and tags into a semantic network? Want to add a slide show of your favorite photos to your homepage and include user comments? How about autotagging your photos based on image analysis or photo description or title? Or allowing users to pick a Picasa Web Albums photo from inside your application? The possibilities are endless.

We're excited to see what great ideas the developer community comes up with for the Picasa Web Albums data API. We hope this newest installment gives you the freedom to make the killer application you always wanted, and as always we encourage comments, questions and criticisms. Tell us what you think.

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