Code Review: Friend Connect, App Engines kick in, Flash-y maps, and documenting the Open Web

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

With Google I/O around the corner on May 28-29th in San Francisco, you can feel excitement bubbling within the Google Developer Programs team and beyond.

We had another Campfire One this week, and this time the team introduced Friend Connect, a way to easily add social features to your website using open protocols such as OpenID, OAuth, and OpenSocial APIs. Below is a short walk through:



The previous Campfire One was held to announce Google App Engine, and the engines continue to roar. If you are a Mac user, you may be interested to view the native App Engine Launcher, which allows you to manage your work form a UI that you know and love.

You will want to be able to write a scalable application, and Ken Ashcraft has written up some tips to do just that.

Finally, Guido van Rossum wrote a version of Mondrian, the code review system that he wrote for Googlers, that works with Subversion.

The Geo teams also had some interesting releases. First we had the long awaited official Flash API, and then we saw the new ability to find photos and Wikipedia content right in the Maps UI.

If you really liked the My Map editing tools that were made available on the Google Maps destination site, you will be happy to know that a quick polyline.enableDrawing(); will turn it on for your own mashup, hanks to new API support.

Google Doctype is a bold new undertaking spearheaded by the prolific Mark Pilgrim. Doctype aims to build a test-driven reference to the Open Web. Mark "humbly offers this fledgling encyclopedia under a Creative Commons Attribution license, and we invite the web developers of the world to contribute to it."

When you think of developers around the world, you think of translation. The AJAX Language API can now piggy back on Google Translate adding 10 new languages.

I have been having a great deal of fun with the translation API; translating Twitter on the fly, and more importantly having bookmarklet that can translate any selected text on a page.

I will finish up with some interesting thoughts on ipv6 and the new Google Reader version for iPhone.

As always, listen in to the Google Developers channel, and I hope to see a bunch of you at Google I/O. If you can't make it, be sure to follow us on Twitter as we discuss the event in real-time.