Google Developer Day 2008
I went to Google Developer Day 2008 in Yokohama Japan yesterday. The keynote speech was pretty much the exact same info as was given at the keynote at Google I/O where Google announced their direction, moving forward the web as a platform.
Keynote
As with the Google I/O keynote it was mentioned how Google feels that Computing power and accessibility have kind of flip-flopped over the years. In the mainframe era you had computing power but no accessibility, in the PC era you had accessibility but lost relative computing power, and now in the web era we are getting back computing power in the form of cloud computing but we are losing accessibility to those resources. They plan on fixing this with the, so called, three Cs. Client, Connectability, and Cloud.
The first refers to the browser, so Google wants to make the browser richer in order to give us accessibility to the computing power that they can provide. They are doing this with Google Gears and some other handy browser plugins.
Connectability refers to allowing everyone equal access to resources and making sure everyone can connect. This means making sure that internet lines are fast, airwaves are open etc. They see mobiles as big in the future so they hope to help the connectability problem with Android, their free, open operating system for mobiles.
Cloud refers to their vast data centers. They hope to give access to these resources through products like App Engine where developers can access the vast resources and scalability that Google’s data centers provide.
App Engine Hackathon
In the afternoon I attended the App Engine Hackathon which was presided over by Brett Slatkin, who is none other than the guy in the App Engine demo video. It was interesting because from the e-mails I received about the event, I figured it would be in Japanese but it ended up being entirely in English. Many of the Japanese folks had trouble following along so I tried to help where I could.
In the beginning, Brett talked about App Engine and used an example wiki as a demo app. Then we went into coding our projects. At the end some folks showed off their applications. Despite the language barriers many folks came up with some really original, and cool ideas. The first was created by a Google engineer, who said he would set the bar low but ended up with one of the better applications. His app read calendar events from RSS and allowed users to add comments to it. He also implemented Memcached support. There was an application with the idea to attach pictures based on the hostility/mood level of a chat message or Twitter tweet. There was a social bookmarking app, and an app to allow live translating of a Django application.
For what it’s worth I presented my application which I hope to make into a workable form application builder. I haven’t uploaded it yet so you’ll have to make do with my first App Engine application, a prefix calculator with a simple rest API.
Dinner
Afterward, I went out to dinner with a number of folks who participated in the Hackathon. It turned out to be a lot of fun and I made a lot of new friends many of whom are now in my Twitter contacts. All in all a hugely satisfying experience.