Google Adsense College

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product
Manager

Last November, href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/opensocial-makes-web-better.html"
id="acjj" >OpenSocial was created to help build infrastructure
for the social web. OpenSocial provides a common mechanism for
developers to easily hook into many different social networks and
extend their functionality. Sites including MySpace and orkut have
begun to provide OpenSocial applications to their users, and hi5
will be rolling out next week.

Today we're pleased that href="http://ycorpblog.com/2008/03/25/announcing-the-opensocial-foundation/" >
Yahoo! has announced its support for OpenSocial. We're
looking forward to having Yahoo! users join the hundreds of
millions of people who will soon enjoy OpenSocial applications.
This addition means even more distribution for developers,
encourages participation by even more websites, and, most
importantly, results in more features for users all across the
web.

In addition, Yahoo!, MySpace, and Google are joining with the
broader community to create a non-profit foundation to foster the
continued open development of OpenSocial. To that end, we've
also launched href="http://www.opensocial.org/" >OpenSocial.org, designed to
become the main documentation hub and primary source of information
about OpenSocial. To learn more, and to get involved, please review
the href="http://sites.google.com/a/opensocial.org/opensocial/OpenSocial-Foundation-Proposal" >
foundation proposal.

With that, welcome, Yahoo! We look forward to growing the social
web together.

Tags: , Dan, ManagerLast, November, OpenSocial, Peterson, Posted, product

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product
Manager

Google has a long history of involvement with universities, and
we're excited to share some recent news on that front with you.
At the main Google campus this week we're hosting the href="http://www.google.com/events/facultysummit2007/agenda.html" >Google
Faculty Summit, which involves href="http://www.stanford.edu/" >universities href="http://www.uiuc.edu/" >all href="http://www.mit.edu/" >over participating in discussions
about what we're up to in research-land as well as computer
science education - something very near and dear to us.

Meanwhile, because we know that between teaching, doing research
and advising students, computer science educators are quite
strapped for time, we've recently launched a site called href="http://code.google.com/edu/" >Google Code for Educators.
While you may have previously heard about our href="http://www.google.com/educators/index.html" >offerings for
K-12 teachers, this new program is focused on CS topics at the
university level, and lets us share the knowledge we've built
up around things like distributed systems and AJAX programming.
It's designed for university faculty to learn about new
computer science topics and include them in their courses, as well
as to help curious students learn on their own.

Right now, Google Code for Educators offers materials for AJAX web
programming, distributed systems and parallel programming, and web
security. The site includes slides, programming labs, problem sets,
background tutorials and videos. We're eager to provide more
content areas and also more iterations for existing topic areas. To
allow for liberal reuse and remixing, most sample course content on
Code EDU is available under a href="http://creativecommons.org/" >Creative Commons license.
Please let us know href="http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Code-for-Educators" >your
thoughts on this new site.

Beyond CS education, another important faculty topic is research.
Google Research offers
resources to CS researchers,including papers authored by Googlers
and a wide variety of our tech talks. You might be interested in
learning more about href="http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html" >MapReduce
and the Google
File System, two pieces of Google-grown technology that have
allowed us to operate at enormous scale. We also recently put
together a few university research programs and we're eager to
see what academics come up with. height="1" width="1" />

Tags: , Dan, history, long, ManagerGoogle, Peterson, Posted, product

Posted by Bruce Johnson and Dan
Peterson, Google Web Toolkit team

We're very pleased to tell you that the href="http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/" >Google Web Toolkit
(GWT) is no longer in beta as of href="http://googlewebtoolkit.blogspot.com/2007/08/gwt-14-release-and-out-of-beta.html" >
today's release of GWT 1.4. For Java developers who have
used GWT to create high-end web applications over the last year,
this may not seem all that surprising. But if you haven't yet
heard the story behind GWT, this seems like the perfect
time…

If you've been in the technology industry for a while, you
probably remember when enterprises and software vendors had to
think pretty hard about whether to develop locally-installed
desktop applications or web-based browser applications. These days,
whether you're building href="http://code.google.com/gme/" >mashups, href="http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/" >gadgets, or
full-blown applications, it's a no-brainer: the browser is the
delivery platform of choice. However, users expect more from the
up-and-coming generation of web applications than the simple
click-and-wait of yesterweb. And if you're a web developer, you
know that this requires href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)" >AJAX,
the cluster of technologies including JavaScript and dynamic HTML
that can make browsers do backflips.

But the stark reality of AJAX applications is that, although they
can deliver sexy features and great usability, they are unusually
hard to engineer. Browser quirks and the anything-goes nature of
JavaScript will inevitably frustrate even the most dedicated
developers and add risk to your schedule with every line of code
written. If you do eventually manage to construct a complex AJAX
application that works, you're likely to find that maintaining
it over time can be a major challenge. And all that doesn't
even scratch the surface of testing, optimizing, securing and
internationalizing your application. (If you are currently working
on an ambitious AJAX project and haven't yet come to this
conclusion, please re-read this post in six months when you're
further along!)

We've learned a lot from our experiences building web
applications, and we're happy to share the tools we've
created. Google Web Toolkit is an open source project that helps
Java developers harness the richness of AJAX in a cross-platform,
web-friendly environment. The magic trick is that GWT
cross-compiles Java source code into standalone JavaScript that you
can include in any web page. Instead of spending time becoming
JavaScript gurus and fighting browser quirks, developers using GWT
spend time productively coding and debugging in the robust Java
programming language, using their existing Java tools and
expertise. Naturally, GWT is also a great way to easily take
advantage of the latest-and-greatest Google APIs and browser
enhancements, such as href="http://code.google.com/apis/gears/" >Google Gears.

In addition to making debugging far easier, GWT's unique
compilation-based approach to AJAX has the nice property that it
rewards developers for good software engineering practices. Java
source code that is clear and organized can be easily optimized by
the GWT compiler, which is a nice antidote to the frequent
hack-and-slash approach that's all too common in JavaScript
development. As your application grows, the GWT compiler begins to
pay off in even bigger ways. Unused code is automatically removed
so that scripts are smaller and pages load faster. Complex code can
be automatically coalesced and simplified. Most importantly,
because the Java language is statically typed, many common errors
can be caught during development rather than production. You can
observe the high-performance results yourself in GWT's href="http://gwt.google.com/samples/Mail/Mail.html" >sample Mail
application.

Technical details aside, GWT makes it easy to develop fast,
friendly web apps that users love — which is, after all, the
point.

Download
GWT 1.4. height="1" width="1" />

Tags: , Bruce, Dan, google, Johnson, Peterson, Posted, Web