Google Code

Google Code is Google's site for developer tools, APIs and technical resources. The site contains documentation on using Google developer tools and APIs - including discussion groups and blogs for developers using Google's developer products.

There are APIs offered for almost all of Google's popular consumer products like Google Maps, YouTube, Google Apps and even Google Wave.

The site also features a variety of developer products and tools built specifically for developers. Google App Engine is a hosting service for web apps. Project Hosting gives users version control for open source code. Google Web Toolkit allows developers to create Ajax applications in the Java programming language.

The site contains reference information for community based developer products that Google is involved with like Android from the Open Handset Alliance and OpenSocial from the OpenSocial Foundation.

Google APIs

Google offers a variety of APIs, mostly web APIs for web developers. The APIs are based on popular Google consumer products, including Google Maps, Google Earth, AdSense, Adwords, Google Apps and YouTube.

Google Data APIs

The Google Data APIs allow programmers to create applications that read and write data from Google services. Currently, these include APIs for Google Apps, Google Analytics, Blogger, Google Base, Google Book Search, Google Calendar, Google Code Search, Google Spreadsheets, Google Notebook, and Picasa Web Albums.

AJAX APIs

Google's AJAX APIs let a developer implement rich, dynamic web sites entirely in JavaScript and HTML. A developer can create a map to a site, a dynamic search box, or download feeds with just a few lines of JavaScript.

Ads APIs

The AdSense and AdWords APIs, based on the SOAP data exchange standard, allow developers to integrate their own applications with these Google services. The AdSense API allows owners of web sites and blogs to manage AdSense sign-up, content and reporting, while the AdWords API gives AdWords customers programmatic access to their AdWords accounts and campaigns.

Developer Tools & Open source projects

App Engine

Google App Engine lets developers run web applications on Google's infrastructure. Google App Engine supports apps written in several programming languages. With App Engine's Java runtime environment, you can build your app using standard Java technologies, including the JVM, Java servlets, and the Java programming language—or any other language using a JVM-based interpreter or compiler, such as JavaScript or Ruby. App Engine also features a dedicated Python runtime environment, which includes a fast Python interpreter and the Python standard library.

Gears

Gears is beta software offered by Google to enable off-line access to services that normally only work on-line. It installs a database engine, based on SQLite, on the client system to cache the data locally. Gears-enabled pages use data from this local cache rather than from the online service. Using Gears, a web application may periodically synchronize the data in the local cache with the online service. If a network connection is not available, the synchronization is deferred until a network connection is established. Thus Gears enables web applications to work even though access to the network service is not present.

Google Web Toolkit

The Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source toolkit allowing developers to create Ajax applications in the Java programming language. GWT supports rapid client/server development and debugging in any Java IDE. In a subsequent deployment step, the GWT compiler translates a working Java application into equivalent JavaScript that programmatically manipulates a web browser's HTML DOM using DHTML techniques. GWT emphasizes reusable, efficient solutions to recurring Ajax challenges, namely asynchronous remote procedure calls, history management, bookmarking, and cross-browser portability. It is released under the Apache License version 2.0.

Project hosting

Google Code runs a project hosting service that provides revision control offering both Subversion and Mercurial (transparently implemented using BigTable as storage), an issue tracker, a wiki for documentation, and a file download feature. The service is available and free for all Open Source projects that are licensed under one of nine licenses (Apache, Artistic, BSD, GPLv2, GPLv3, LGPL, MIT, MPL and EPL). The site limits the number of projects one person can have to 25. Additionally, there is a limit as to the number of projects that may be created in one day.

Access Restrictions

Accessing Google Code website and its hosted contents is banned from countries on the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control sanction list, including Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria.

Google Developer Events

Google I/O is Google's largest developer event. This year it was held in Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Google Summer of Code is a mentoring program to find students for open source projects. In 2007, the program received nearly 6,200 applications.

Google Code Jam is an international programming competition.

See also

• CodePlex
• Sourceforge.net
• Comparison of open source software hosting facilities

External links

• Google Code website
• Google Web Toolkit
• Wikia Google Toolkit, a complete wiki about GWT
• A detailed list of the features of Google Code - Project Hosting