Live From Google I/O

Mark Hendrickson
TechCrunch.com
Wednesday, May 28, 2008 2:09 PM

We're here at the Moscone Center in San Francisco for Google I/O.

VP of engineering Vic Gundotra is kicking things off with a keynote, which we will be streaming and live blogging below. Also see our gallery of photos below from an Android demonstration given during the keynote.

See our expectations for the event here.

Vic Guntodra Keynote Notes

Main theme for the conference: making the cloud more accessible

Google was born in the era of the web; only platform our company has ever known

word of consensus and partnership

We owe a debt of gratitude to the web and open source technologies

"standing upon the shoulders of open source work"

Committed to working with the open source community and giving back

We are probably the company most incentivized to move the internet forward because it indirectly drives search traffic, generates revenue for Google

Google wants to make the web client (browser) more powerful

Gmail in 2004 started to demonstrate how Ajax could enable powerful apps in the browser

It's unacceptable that it takes so long to innovate in the browser; believe in time the experience will get richer and richer

Google Gears is an exciting way to extend the browser. But we're not only excited about the adoption of Gears, but happy with how HTML 5 incorporates offline functionality. We believe HTML 5 is the future direction. "Deep support and commitment for HTML 5¿

Bringing Allen Hurff, Engineering SVP for MySpace, onto stage to talk about MySpace's work with Gears.

Hurff: asynchronous threads, full text ability, SQL database on local machine ¿ all important for developers; will provide live demo of MySpace's implementation.

Now a search box and sorting for MySpace messaging. Functionality was easy to develop; it's the power of Gears that makes this possible. You can always turn off Gears and get the message data off your machine.

Vic back on stage; mentions how Gears takes advantage of end user's computational power.

Turning attention to mobile applications. They're not fun to develop; have to support so many platforms. RIM, BlackBerry, iPhone, Java clients, Samsung, etc ¿ 14 platforms if you're serious about developing for mobile; very fragmented.

Not every team has resources Google does to build for every platform. Google is betting on browser over time for mobile devices; it will be the entry point for many applications.

But today, the only browsers capable for supporting mobile apps include iPhone and few others. So Google is developing Android, which includes world class Webkit browser.

Steve Horowitz, Engineering Director for Android, brought on stage to talk about Android and where it's at.

Horowitz: Demoing a device with Android; showing unlocking, standard home screen. Has the same layout as iPhone (prominent icons in grid) and touch screen capabilities. Photos coming soon¿

Phone can track live movements, pan around Street View by just moving phone.

Vic invites Kevin Gibbs, Tech Lead Google App Engine, to talk about Google's cloud services. Hard to get web services off the ground as things stand. Want to make it easy to build and scale apps ¿ and for free to start.

App Engine's three design goals: easy to start, easy to scale, free to get started. What can you build on App Engine? Two examples: TweetWheel (visualize Twitter friends), and LaterLoop, a 'read webpages later' app. Both hosted and built on App Engine.

Going into the App Engine new APIs announced yesterday: Memcache and Image Manipulation. Memcache is important for scaling. Image Manipulation allows you to, well, manipulate images inside App Engine, and do so efficiently. Announced the pricing, as well. Billing is not done yet, but will be done by the end of the year. And finally, Gibbs announces that App Engine is open. Applauses from the audience.

Mark Lucovksy, Techincal Director is up on stage, here to take about Google Data APIs (Gdata). They offer read/write APIs to Google Services, like Calendar, Docs, YouTube, etc. Now talking about the AJAX APIs, which offer similar services, but more about embedding Google services via a read-only REST API. They call it "sprinkle the web onto your applications." Think embedding Google Maps on your site. Here comes a demo.

Lucovsky is showing off a simple celebrity fan site hosted on Blogger. It's about how have searchable YouTube videos on your site. Some javascript in the header that brings a video strip on the right-hand side of the screen, plus a Google search bar at the bottom of the page. All the calls are AJAX and you can even contain links in the page which modify the videos in the right-hand strip without any reloading. These Google AJAX APIs are pretty impressive in terms of flexibility and features. His last one, the Google Translate API, is particularly powerful for your blog.

At 10:41 AM, Vic takes back the stage, and promptly introduces Bruce Johnson, Engineering Manager for Google Web Toolkit. The toolkit is targeted for "highly ambitious" AJAX applications. He says, the truth is that the browsers are capable of highly interactive AJAX apps, you just can't spend all your time fighting browser quirks. Toolkit also allows you to write javascript code in the regular Java language and use your favorite Java tools (ie IDEs).

GWT does this: it takes java source, "optimally" cross-compiles it, and produces compiled javascript. I believe him; this is probably way easier. And the idea is that they do all the hard work with GWT in terms of optimization and provides tools to make it possible. Demo'ing the JAVA -> GWT -> JAVASCRIPT process. Using the Eclipse IDE. Bruce says you get to use Object Oriented Programming, "which some have found useful in the past." Allows programmers to set "breakpoints" in the code (places where the code delibrately stops for debugging purposes). Also shows Lombardi Blueprint, an GWT site with some impressive graphics where data is all loading via AJAX.

Lastly, Bruce announces two things: one, the GWT 1.5 release, and two, which he says is their most requested feature: Java 5 support. Google Web Toolkit is open-source as well. Supports new languages (right-to-left). Longest guest speaker of the presentation.

Vic comes back to a joke that Bruce is "Bringing Java Back" a la Justin Timberlake ("Bringing Sexy Back") ¿ Vic says "you gotta take a chance" when it comes to humor during these things.

Moving to the OpenSocial section of the keynote, Vic brings up David Glazer, Engineering Director. "Surf Report on the Social Web: Surfs Up." Two things are coming together: social (people care about people and want to connect) and "the web is a pretty good idea. It's the notion that taking a few good standards¿ and allow things to connect¿ you get the web."

David talks about three standards: OpenID, OAuth, and OpenSocial. Identity, Authorization, and Apps, respectively. OpenID is growing, he says. Authorization is an important problem, needs to work, be secure, and not be too laborious. Finally, you have to use identity and the data these identities want to expose, and then do stuff with it: that's the idea behind OpenSocial. OpenSocial is a set (or family) of APIs, it's a reference implementation, and it's a community of developers, containers, and apps. Lots of OpenSocial sessions here at Google IO.

"Well it wouldn't be a Developer event if there wasn't a long-haired developer from Seattle" ¿ Nat Brown, CTO, iLike comes on stage.