Alex Little

Yesterday I went to the Google Developer Day in London and learned quite a lot of new ‘stuff’ about the APIs they are producing and what’s coming up in the future, so here’s a brief overview of the workshop sessions I attended… for info, videos of all the sessions are here: http://code.google.com/events/developerday/

Maps API workshop
In this workshop we developed a small maps application, most of which wasn’t that new to me – putting makers on a map, drawing lines etc – much of which I’ve done during the development of the MSG Presence Maps. But there were a couple of new things for me, firstly the driving directions – I hadn’t realised how easy it was to add these to a map or that they were available through the API (plus a text description of the route). Secondly, Google Mapplets, now you can develop a mapping application and combine it with other mapping applications (either porduced by you or other people) so, for example, you could use an estate agents mapplet to find houses in an area, and use a schools mapplet to find schools in the same area – these would all be overlayed on the same map, and you can add/create other mapplets as you like. (Mapplets info & demo).

Google Gears
This seems to have been mentioned everywhere else in the last few days – so should mention it here too Essentially it’s an open source browser plugin to allow you to continue to use web applications even when you’re offline – giving seamless experience between on/off-line. There’s plenty more info about it around. It was very interesting to see the WorkerPool – which provides thread-like ability for JavaScript – preventing your browser freezing up whilst some long winded JavaScript is running. I was slightly unconvinced though by their reasoning behind not dealing with synchronisation conflicts (where two people update the same data whilst offline and then try to sychnronise their changes back), in saying that this was for the application to deal with – I know it’s a hard problem (maybe impossible to create totally automatic synchronisation conflict resolution?) but I feel conflicts should be highlighted by the synchronisation engine – not the application (as other db synchronisation managers do).

Maps – new features
(lots of maps stuff for me today!) There was more mention/explanation here of the Mapplets, but I also found out some more things abotu the existing API that I didn’t know you could do. For example the overview map (small large scale map in bottom right of the main map – to give some context) – I’d not realised this was available through the API – so going to look at adding this to MSG Presence Maps. Similarly with the CustomControlArea – this might be a good place to put the MSG user search – in a box overlayed on the map – in fact maybe all the controls, eg group selection etc could go here? Also thought about making the mashup.jsp service from BuddyXML return KML which could then just be loaded driectly into the small ‘online users’ map in the MSG block.

All in all a very worthwhile day out & learned quite a lot (which didn’t go straight over my head – always a bonus). As always, it’s just now going to be getting the time (and have an actual application for) to try all of these things out