There’s a time for everything in life: a time for playing, learning & growing up; a time for maturing, working & performing, and a time for retiring, relaxing & handing the reigns over to the next generation. This is true for products too, and this is why, six months ago, we announced our Labs program for Google Code. This program provides clear distinction between graduate developer products where you’ll find mature products with transparent deprecation policies which you can count on for the long run, and labs developer products where you can explore our newest products and get started with them early.
As we also said in that announcement, the time has come for the SOAP Search API to retire – the new generation is around, has graduated, and has largely taken over already as a better and more versatile solution for the vast majority of use cases. In the spirit of our deprecation policies, we’ve continued to support the SOAP Search API since its deprecation in 2006, but we wanted to remind you that it is finally sunsetting. That had been planned for today, but we thought we'd give the few of you still using it another week to be prepared, so we'll be shutting it down on September 7th instead.
Showing posts with label ajax search. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ajax search. Show all posts
Monday, August 31, 2009
Monday, May 4, 2009
Putting the Web in Web Applications
This post is part of the Who's @ Google I/O, a series of blog posts that give a closer look at developers who'll be speaking or demoing at Google I/O. Today's post is a guest post written by Ross Boucher, co-founder of 280 North.
When we set out to build 280 Slides, we wanted to create an application that made no concessions: something that felt as interactive as the desktop experience, while leveraging all the benefits of being online. We coined the term "desktop-class applications" as a way to describe our vision for what web apps should be. We also knew it wasn't enough to just recreate a desktop presentation tool pixel for pixel. We wanted to do something new, and to truly take advantage of being a web based solution.
The key to having a great presentation is having great media. A picture that helps tell the story with infinitely more clarity, or that just helps tell a good joke. A movie that shows a demo of your cool new widget that everyone's going to buy. Not all presentations, and not all individual slides will work this way, but the kind of in-person, captivating speech that Steve Jobs would enjoy relies almost entirely on images. And, of course, an engaging presenter.
So, if having great media is key to having a great presentation, it's important to be able to find great media for your presentation. Not all of us have an art department on hand, so we made this idea central to 280 Slides, and we did it with a lot of help from Google APIs.
If you take a look at what we call the Media inspector, you'll see we have top level choices for pictures, movies, and shapes. Both the pictures and movies tabs let you search popular web services to find the perfect media for your presentation.
When you search for a picture, we send a request to our server, which then sends out requests to several web services. Google's AJAX Search APIs actually enable us to perform server side searches as well, thanks to the Flash and Other Non-JavaScript section of the API. On the server side, this lets us send requests to Google and Flickr at the same time, and convert the responses to a consistent data format.
We're excited about finding other ways to integrate with Google services as well. For example, we hope to eventually enable publishing a presentation directly to YouTube, and use Google to log in to our service rather than having to create a new username.
We're also planning on changing the way we interact with the Google APIs. In addition to 280 Slides, our company makes a web application framework called Cappuccino. The media integration in 280 Slides has been a huge hit with our users, so we plan to build this feature directly into Cappuccino and let anyone building a web app integrate media searching with little effort. This means changing our approach from server-side to client side aggregation using JSONP. The AJAX APIs, YouTube APIs, and all the other APIs we use are now available by using JSON with padding. JSONP lets us work around the browser's same-origin policy to better integrate with third-party web services without proxying through a server.
280 North is going to be at Google I/O on May 27-28 to show off 280 Slides and how we integrate with the Google APIs. We'll also be showing off the beginnings of integrating this in Cappuccino which should be interesting to JavaScript developers. We hope you'll stop by the Sandbox!
If you want to learn more about how 280 Slides uses Google APIs, check out these Google Code videos with one of the co-founders:
When we set out to build 280 Slides, we wanted to create an application that made no concessions: something that felt as interactive as the desktop experience, while leveraging all the benefits of being online. We coined the term "desktop-class applications" as a way to describe our vision for what web apps should be. We also knew it wasn't enough to just recreate a desktop presentation tool pixel for pixel. We wanted to do something new, and to truly take advantage of being a web based solution.
The key to having a great presentation is having great media. A picture that helps tell the story with infinitely more clarity, or that just helps tell a good joke. A movie that shows a demo of your cool new widget that everyone's going to buy. Not all presentations, and not all individual slides will work this way, but the kind of in-person, captivating speech that Steve Jobs would enjoy relies almost entirely on images. And, of course, an engaging presenter.
So, if having great media is key to having a great presentation, it's important to be able to find great media for your presentation. Not all of us have an art department on hand, so we made this idea central to 280 Slides, and we did it with a lot of help from Google APIs.
If you take a look at what we call the Media inspector, you'll see we have top level choices for pictures, movies, and shapes. Both the pictures and movies tabs let you search popular web services to find the perfect media for your presentation.
When you search for a picture, we send a request to our server, which then sends out requests to several web services. Google's AJAX Search APIs actually enable us to perform server side searches as well, thanks to the Flash and Other Non-JavaScript section of the API. On the server side, this lets us send requests to Google and Flickr at the same time, and convert the responses to a consistent data format.
We're excited about finding other ways to integrate with Google services as well. For example, we hope to eventually enable publishing a presentation directly to YouTube, and use Google to log in to our service rather than having to create a new username.
We're also planning on changing the way we interact with the Google APIs. In addition to 280 Slides, our company makes a web application framework called Cappuccino. The media integration in 280 Slides has been a huge hit with our users, so we plan to build this feature directly into Cappuccino and let anyone building a web app integrate media searching with little effort. This means changing our approach from server-side to client side aggregation using JSONP. The AJAX APIs, YouTube APIs, and all the other APIs we use are now available by using JSON with padding. JSONP lets us work around the browser's same-origin policy to better integrate with third-party web services without proxying through a server.280 North is going to be at Google I/O on May 27-28 to show off 280 Slides and how we integrate with the Google APIs. We'll also be showing off the beginnings of integrating this in Cappuccino which should be interesting to JavaScript developers. We hope you'll stop by the Sandbox!
If you want to learn more about how 280 Slides uses Google APIs, check out these Google Code videos with one of the co-founders:
Friday, April 10, 2009
Google Narratives Series: Chirag Mehta
It's time for another Google Narrative, highlighting a Google AJAX Search API developer, Chirag Mehta.Chirag is developer in St. Petersburg, Florida who got started coding on a ZX Spectrum almost twenty years ago and has dabbled in graphics, animation, databases, ERP/CRMs, and productivity apps. He is currently working as an IT director and is in a graduate program in Technology Management at University of Tampa. He co-founded Chime.TV in 2007 and Sched.org in 2008. His favorite area of development is simple web utilities. Chirag and his wife love animals and when he's not coding or studying, he is either kayaking or playing with their pets.
A: My wife's currently in medical school and constantly doing searches online for medical terms. Wikipedia offered tons of information but she found their search feature to be insufficient for her needs. 90% of the time, you have no idea what you're searching for or guessing at it - it doesn't do anything to help you out. I wanted to help my wife have a faster, more dynamic experience so I brainstormed how to build a XML-type of search feature, similar to Google Search Suggest, while you were on Wikipedia. (It also helped that I'd always found Wikipedia interesting and researched databases that used it as a source of information.) That also led me to start looking at implementation options and of them all, AJAX Search seemed the easiest to integrate in a quick manner. Instead of taking two weeks to research documentation and then implement with other APIs, it took about an hour with Google AJAX Search. Also, I had worked with many Google APIs on other projects before, but the Google AJAX API was the best. The speed was amazing!
The idea for creating Drop Search came soon after fiddling with more Google AJAX search documentation. My implementation gives the everyday person without a programming background the ability to add a customized search engine to any site. It's code that you can copy and paste into your application and customize for your own needs using CSS, which I did for my own blog. A friend of mine at Rutgers University saw what I did and wanted the same type of feature for their professional development site so I released the code that I created to everyone on my projects page.
Q: Describe any obstacles you had with implementation.
A: There were none. Actually I had a couple of questions at first but I looked at the forums and got the answer fairly quickly. They were around legal issues - Am I allowed to query as I type? Is it legal that I'm doing this with Wiki search? I wish legal terms were much clearer on Google Code. I had some assumptions, only to find out they were recommendations rather than requirements. I do have to say that the documentation on Google Code is perfect. One minute you're reading documentation, the next you're in the forums reading about other developers' experiences. Help pages are broken down into every bit so it makes coding a cakewalk. It's a really good experience compared to other sites.
Q: Can you provide any tips for other developers using Google AJAX Search API?
A: Before you try to build something, find out if Google already has. Google will build 98% of your needs on the back end, leaving you 2% of the work to focus on making your user interface exactly what you need for the front end. Also, another tip... listen to your wife's complaints.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Playing around with Google's AJAX APIs
For me, documentation isn't always enough to learn about APIs; I need examples that I can play with. That's why I started a fun project recently--a tool for teaching developers how to use Google's JavaScript APIs: the AJAX API Playground. I have been working on this in my 20% time and today I am proud to announce that we are launching the AJAX API Playground as the official way that Google will show JavaScript samples!
As the AJAX API Playground is built on App Engine, you can create your own App Engine instance to show off your code samples. The code is open sourced under an Apache 2.0 license and uses several open source libraries and tools, including jQuery, jQuery UI, YUI Compressor, and CodeMirror. You can find the code on Google Project Hosting and learn about adding samples on the project wiki.
Stay tuned for more samples for more APIs. Enjoy!
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
2008 U.S. Election Site: How did we do that?
Mark Lucovsky of the Google AJAX APIs team has written up a detailed article on how the 2008 U.S. Election site was created and implemented.
A myriad of the AJAX APIs are used here. The election news comes from:
- A News Search:
http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/news?v=1.0&q=Barack%20Obama%20unitedstates_uselections - A channel search for the YouTube tab:
http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/video?v=1.0&q=ytchannel:barackobamadotcom - And, a Custom Search Engine was created for the blog search:
http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&q=Barack%20Obama&cx=010222979794876194725:pqldevwuapa.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Google AJAX APIs available from outside of the browser
The AJAX API team just posted about using Flash and the server side to access the AJAX APIs.
This is very exciting, as it now allows you the developer to access not only Google Web Search results, but also query video, images, news, local, and other search functions. Also, this covers the AJAX Feed API which means you can get access to feeds in a normalized manner, and the new AJAX Language API to do translations and language detection.
If you step back, you can see this as a Google REST API, and some of you have wondered how it compares to the SOAP API.
I got to go to the horses mouth, Mark Lucovsky (team lead for the AJAX APIs), to discuss what this new access point is all about, and you may be a little surprised with the content.
We discuss the fact that this has actually been running for quite some time, but we now have clarified it as an official end point for your usage. This also means that it has thorough documentation, which was important as Mark talks about how some people have been using the API incorrectly.
Mark clarifies the terms of use, and you come out of this in the knowledge that his team has been attacking very different problems to the original SOAP API team. He has been ruthlessly practical, as you will understand as he talks about the problems his team are solving, and the breadth of sites that are using these APIs, including some very big names.
Enough of me talking, let's listen to Mark:
Hear more from Mark on the AJAX APIs, Vadim on accessing the APIs outside of AJAX, and Derek on advanced development using AJAX Apis at Google I/O.
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