Google Developer Day 2009 Report

Google Developer Day was held today.

Still, Google is Google ... :-)
Very interesting people, an interesting way to think, interesting ideas.
In general, if you were not there, you have lost a lot.
')
Brett Slatkin was the most interesting storyteller for me. And the most interesting topic is his story about PubSubHubbub , a publish-subscribe protocol. Brett told how everything was arranged there and, what was especially valuable, why it was arranged that way.

And after all it is interesting, what would normal people do when creating their own publish-subscribe? Perhaps, they would take some ready-made solution from a multitude of possible ones, and relying on it would invent how to do better and get rid of the existing shortcomings. But this is Google, and the guys have come from the other end. They took Atom and RSS, and began to think what was missing there to get instant notification. Therefore, their solution is very simple, very elegant and very Web-based.


Another Brett talked about the new Task Queue API in Google App Engine. And, which is especially valuable, he told why it is needed and what tasks are conveniently solved with the help of it. In general, Brett, thank you so much and kowtow. You know what a simple Russian developer needs for complete happiness. :-)

By the way, about simple Russian developers. As it was announced, the program was changed compared to last year - according to numerous requests from the workers, the “practice” was thrown out, when participants, under the guidance of Google engineers, wrote a simple code. Instead, a lot of “theory” was added, in other words, the very engineers told us about things that were sometimes not too simple, but really interesting. Interestingly, such requests from workers are local specifics or have similar changes also occurred in other, less Russian regions? :-)

Unfortunately, a bit of boredom in the form of “writing something step-by-step” still broke through to the conference. We got one such unsuccessful report - about Android. Fortunately, only one.

The guys from the Sydney office, plus for artistry. The Google Wave presentation at the opening was a real show. :-) For Google Wave itself, too, thank you very much. If on the technical side some decisions cause me a little bewilderment, then conceptually this is a definite breakthrough.

Speaking of speeches. It is very striking that all the guys from Google are very lively, natural, real. They speak with feeling, easily, freely. Ours are not able to speak at all. Even if they did a great thing, they can't tell about it. Chained, confused, lost. Guys, this is not a reproach, I have the same thing, also multiplied by the lack of experience of performances. Just something is probably wrong in our IT culture. Need to pull up.

A couple of words about Java and XML. I am haunted by the feeling that working with these things has a negative effect on living organisms. People who often have to deal with this look tired and far less happy than those who are a little luckier. And the deeper a person has to dip into it, the more noticeable the effect. At the conference, these feelings were very strong. The python player is visible in the crowd of developers, there are no curly braces around him. :-)

The developers of Google Wave, it seemed to me, almost apologized for using GWT. No, they said it was the right choice, but they didn’t say anything very confidently. What can I say ... The decision is dubious, as well as the decision to take XMPP as the basis of its protocol. Already because all this is out of the other elegant web-way solutions. But the GWT itself received thanks to this a good acceleration in development. His unreadiness to support applications of this kind was revealed, it was necessary to drastically modify it. Thanks to the needs of Google Wave, Google Gears has also received new features. All this is very good, but you need to understand that both GWT and Google Gears just plug holes, flaws in web concepts. Sooner or later, the web will outgrow these flaws and then, I hope, the use of GWT and Google Gears will become meaningless. Thanks to the needs of Google Wave, Google Chrome Frame also came into being. Another plugged gap, and I am very glad that it is plugged. Well, at least so.

Special thanks to Chris Shabo for the story about OpenSocial . It was only an overview story, but very valuable nonetheless. The platform, as it turned out, is much better developed than I thought and, moreover, continues to evolve with some inhuman speed.

Chris answered some important questions for me.
- Why Google applications do not allow me to identify myself with my existing OpenID, force me to start a Google Account?
- Why, although it’s possible to use Google Account as OpenID and, perhaps, it’s quite difficult, besides, will the URL be long and ugly? Why do developers have to use a separate OpenID authentication mechanism for Google Account?
- How to solve the problem that a user can have several OpenIDs received on different services, despite the fact that they are equivalent and the user wants to use any of them without thinking? How can different services understand that these OpenIDs address the same person?

In response to the first question, Chris said that for him this also remains a question. :-) And that apparently, the ability to identify yourself with existing OpenID in Google applications will still appear.

Regarding the second question, he said that the protocol is currently being finalized to allow using not only the URL, but also the email address as an identifier, and stricterly - any line like somebody@somewhere.com. When these changes are made to the protocol, the problem will be solved, Google Account OpenID will look exactly like your address in GMail.

It was a surprise to me that a solution also exists on the third question. This is a webfinger . In addition, WebFinger can be the answer to the second question.

Mark Pilgrim’s story about HTML 5 I, as a person who smoked WhatWG specs while working on a prototype of a web drawing, was not very interesting, but it aroused great interest and excitement among the masses. Ho-ho guys, do not oversleep the future, it is already here!

I summarize. Google Developer Day is a cool thing. Such events are very rare, even in Moscow, not to mention our other vast expanses. Do not miss. :-)