Keynote with Jeff Huber: The last leg begins. California is live.

Posted by Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

It has been a fascinating time watching the Google Developer Day conference run across the globe.

I woke up this morning, jumped on the site, and saw this picture of where we are at:



Out East the red countries had completed their day, we had a throbbing live middle, and California was waiting to join the party, and now it is here:

We will be updating you during the day over on the California location, and we will make sure to aggregate the content here.

The community has had plenty to say about Google Gears, and we have more presentations to give today on the topic. Be sure to check the webcast schedule and join in if you can't be in San Jose itself.

I am now sitting at the keynote in the San Jose Convention Center, with building blocks on stage, and shortly Jeff Huber will be joining them.... and here he is.

Jeff starts off by welcoming everyone around the world, and talks about why we brought the event to the world instead of trying to bring everyone to California. I think it has proven to be a great decision.

Jeff then went through a brief history of Google with respect to developer products, and how Google Maps spurred on the growth of APIs from 2005 onwards, where we added a slew of APIs.

The building blocks of Open Source, Mashups, Standards, and Ads fit a new model of application development. The point isn't that you need to use all of these, but that you can put what you need together, and you can use this leverage to create applications in short order.

Integrate, Reach, Build. These are the segments that Google has found to group its developer products, and we will be showing announcements in each of these areas in the keynote itself.

Would you like to see us release these?

• jogplanner.google.com
• apartmentfinder.google.com
• moviemaps.google.com
• coolphotoeditor.google.com
• syncingservice.google.com
• certifiedusedcars.google.com

We aren't releasing these of course, because you have already created them using our building blocks. Jeff walked through some examples of these, such as Picnik, Veloroutes, Honda Used Cars, and more.

Google Mashup Editor

Paul McDonald joins the stage to show us the new Google Mashup Editor. Paul's use case is creating a mashup of products related to California State Parks. The sample starts with a simple HTML table, and with a couple of XML tags, gm:list to get a list of data, and gm:map to place that list on the map in the form of markers. He then adds interactivity with a simple gm:handleEvent that ties to the list, and finally adds a Google Base search component that ties this all in.

Creating mashups is one piece of the puzzle. The mashup editor then allows you to publish this content to Google's infrastructure. You can also publish these to iGoogle.

Jeff gets back on stage and shows off some Gadgets, and the impressive number of page views that these Gadgets are creating. They range from hobbies (arcade games, todo list) to commercial (Expedia). Gadgets are not just for iGoogle though, they are integrated all over the place.

Google Mapplets

Thai Tran takes over at this point, and introduces us to the new release in Maps and Gadgets.... Mapplets.

Thai starts off by showing an Orbitz example, that takes Maps, and makes hotel searches on it real. He then included a WeatherBug Mapplet, so you can choose a hotel based on the temperature as well as the pure location.

Google Web Toolkit

Jeff talks about the GWT community, and the impressive announcement that the toolkit reached a million downloads.

Google Gears

The key points:

• Offline access for web apps
• Cross-browser, cross-platform
• Open source
• Evolutionary approach
• Moving towards standard; working with industry partners

Othman Laraki now takes the stage and explains the Google Gears vision. The point that this is evolutionary is very important to the team.

Othman demonstrates the new Google Reader with offline support. Doing a demo where you turn off the internet is always nerve-wracking, and the network kept finding him!

Jeff then rejoined the stage to discuss the partnership with Mozilla, Adobe, and Opera. Representatives are at the event, and will be participating with the project.

Kevin Lynch of Adobe then jumped up on state and demos a Flex application (Salesbuilder). Kevin fired up a SQLite Explorer tool to query the Gears database, and he shows going offline in the application.

He then ties it into Apollo, and how you can take these applications onto the desktop.

Jeff then invited Sergey Brin to join us, and he was very curious about the blocks on stage. Sergey talked about how he thinks we are at a great time for the internet, and compared the timeline with a compiler. That magic time where a compiler can compile itself. Now, we can create internet apps with internet apps.

Jeff then wraps up the talk, calling to the community to go forth and prosper. Now on to the sessions...