Google's developers share their master plan with web engineers in San Francisco.

Google hosted nearly 3,000 web developers in Downtown San Francisco this May, for a technical conference dubbed "Google IO." Featuring two days of in-depth talks, Q and A chats with Google engineers, and an introductory session, the conference reflected a strong showing of Google's plan for the World Wide Web, and accompanying technology. Google's Engineering VP, Vic Gundotra, presented the conference's opening keynote address, essentially identifying Google's motives in such enterprises succinctly: as the Web becomes better, Google receives more revenue. Many of Google's most impressive initiatives involve this overarching principle, which other software giants have utilized in the past. The primary difference between Google's goals, and that of other development firms, is its acceptance of Open Source.

Mr. Gundotra explained that as the snowball movement brought to life many of the world's most powerful software solutions, including Mozilla's Firefox web browser and the multitude of Linux flavors, the consensus are that Open Source is what built the Web. The reasoning is that if developers agreed on protocols such as HTTP and TCP/IP, and standards like CSS and XML; why, then, should agreement not play a leading role in the future expansions of the Web's potential?

Google sees three major areas of improvement for the Web, the first being the client itself. Netscape and Internet Explorer were likely the most important catalysts in bringing the Web to users and allowing free exploration of its offerings. Considering the immense success surrounding Firefox, Google wants to take the client and give it the power to compete directly with installed programs. This is a tactic long in the works - indeed Google Docs has been battling Microsoft's Office Suite for just over a year. The biggest advantages of web-centric applications, such as data portability and lack of install, have been largely undeveloped.

Enter ''Gears,'' a formerly-Google toolset that has begun using the power of a user's terminal (read: their PC itself) to enhance web applications. Though used primarily to give web apps offline access, Gears uses a JavaScript API to do much more for clients using it. During Mr. Gundotra's keynote, Allen Hurff, Engineering SVP at MySpace, presented a live demo of what Gears is doing for their application.

Paging through a long list of messages in MySpace can be a painful process, however, with Gears, users can turn on an active search feature that allows for sorting: incremental and decremental from the top of a column, and search that sorts messages in real-time, as one types. Probably the most attractive feature of Gears is the idea that such features require only the install of Gears itself; there are no Grease monkey scripts, and no plug-ins required.

Beyond what was shown during the keynote, sessions on Gears itself showed wonderful opportunities, including the ability to create natural desktop shortcuts to often-visited web apps, create desktop notifications, use the native filesystem, a datatype called the 'blob,' and the use of geolocation tools.

Another hurdle that Mr. Gundotra pointed out is the lack of connectivity found in mobile phones. The iPhone has taken the first dive into creating attractive and logical layouts for mobile phones, as well as other capabilities on the Web. However, Google again wishes to harness the power of Open Source, with Android. The mobile platform includes a fully-functional web browser, called WebKit, and using the API, engineers have crafted a number of tasty applications for mobile phones, including a port of Namco's Pac-man and an amazing feature for Google Streetview, that tracks the motion of a phone and translates it to Streetview (the "compass mode" drew a rather positive response from the crowd).

The last challenge, and one of the most pressing when designing web applications, is the accessibility of Cloud computing. The mainstream utilization of server clouds, has offered a surplus of power at the expense of development ease. Getting software to scale across multiple servers to handle the numbers of users found today in the Web's most popular applications is an immense challenge. Google, in an attempt to streamline development of both large and small scale applications, has unleashed the Google Apps Engine for developers, offering free access to Google's server cloud via Python, and an SQL-esque data server. Using good design techniques, many of which were explored during a great session presented by Brett Slatkin of Google, applications will scale to meet the needs of any number of users, concurrent or otherwise. While development and subsequent launch are free using the Google platform, those applications surpassing certain limits can pay for additional resources.

Many of Google's most powerful utilities focus on bottom-up development of new sites and applications, but even existing sites can become more interactive with some of Google's APIs. Including a few JavaScript commands, allows developers to use Google services such as Docs, Calendar, and Spreadsheets, to add functionality to a web site. During Mr. Gundotra's keynote, Mark Lucovsky, Technical Director for Google Data and AJAX, showed developers how to add Youtube panels, Media RSS feeds (text-only and fully imaged), Maps support, and access to Google's Translation API. Even the simplest of blogs can benefit from the types of interactivity allowed.

One of the biggest concerns web developers voice, is the lack of traditional tools such as those used in other areas of software development, including debugging and benchmarking tools. WebToolkit is another brilliant piece of software that allows developers to write code first in Java, using any of the excellent IDEs with which they are already familiar, and then cross-compiling the code into JavaScript for deployment. The output is optimized during the process, and since it is possible to use OO design in apps, the result is code that is easy to maintain after launch.

At the end of the day, these tools still require developers to accept them, as well as use their own creative energies, however, the benefits to be gained in their use is readily apparent. What makes these tools so powerful is not so much that a giant such as Google is behind their development, but that Google is embracing Open Source for long term support. The next few years should give rise to a whole new generation of web-based applications. With any luck, an exciting new paradigm will be created, for the role of the Internet, as well as overall computer usage.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Brandon Hess is a freelance writer and developer from the San Francisco, CA area.

Discuss this article in our forums

Copyright © by Dedicated Servers, Reseller Web Hosting News All Right Reserved.

Published on: 2008-06-20 (650 reads)