Google Developer Day 2009 - Report

Google Developer Day took place today.

Still, Google is such a Google ... :-)
Very interesting people, an interesting way to think, interesting ideas.
In general, if you were not there, you have lost a lot.

The most interesting storyteller for me was Brett Slatkin . And the most interesting topic is his story about PubSubHubbub , publish-subscribe protocol. Brett told how everything was arranged there and what was especially valuable, why it was arranged that way.

And here it is interesting, what would normal people do when creating their publish-subscribe? Perhaps they would take some ready-made solution out of the many possible ones, and relying on it, they would figure out how to do better and get rid of existing shortcomings. But this is Google, and the guys came from a completely different end. They took Atom and RSS, and began to think what was missing there to receive instant notification. Therefore, their solution is very simple, very elegant and very web-like.


Brett also talked about the new Task Queue API in the Google App Engine. And, which is especially valuable, he told why it was needed and what tasks it was convenient to solve with the help of it. In general, Brett, thank you so much and a deep bow. You know what a simple Russian developer needs to be completely happy. :-)

By the way, about simple Russian developers. As it was announced, the program was changed compared to last year - by the numerous requests of workers, a “practice” was thrown out when participants under the guidance of Google engineers wrote a simple code. In exchange, a lot of “theory” was added, in other words, the very engineers spoke about things that are 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” nevertheless burst into the conference. We came across one such unsuccessful report - about Android. Fortunately, only one.

Children from the Sydney office plus for artistry. The Google Wave presentation at the opening was a real show. :-) Thank you very much for Google Wave itself. If, on the technical side, some solutions make me slightly perplexed, then conceptually this is a definite breakthrough.

By the way, about the performances. It’s very striking that all the guys from Google are very lively, natural, real. They speak with feeling, easily, fluently. Ours are completely unable to speak. Even if they did a cool thing, they can’t talk about it. Bound, confused, lost. Guys, this is not a rebuke, I have the same thing, also multiplied by the lack of experience of speaking. Just something is apparently wrong in our IT culture. You have to pull yourself up.

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

Google Wave developers, it seemed to me, almost apologized for using GWT. No, they said that it was the right choice, but they somehow spoke not 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 knocked out of other elegant web-way solutions. But GWT itself received thanks to this a good acceleration in development. It was revealed that he was not ready to support applications of this kind; he had to radically modify it. Thanks to the needs of Google Wave, Google Gears also got 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 shortcomings and then, hopefully, using GWT and Google Gears will become meaningless. Thanks to the needs of Google Wave, Google Chrome Frame arose. Another plugged gap, and I am very glad that it is plugged. Well, at least that.

Special thanks to Chris Shabo for the talk about OpenSocial . It was just a review story, but nonetheless very valuable. The platform, as it turned out, is much better developed than I thought and, in addition, continues to develop at some inhuman rate.

Chris answered some important questions for me.
- Why Google applications do not allow me to identify with my existing OpenID, make Google Account start?
- Why, although using a Google Account as an OpenID is possible, it is very difficult, in addition, the URL will be long and ugly? Why are developers forced to use a separate authentication mechanism from OpenID 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 hesitation? 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 as an existing OpenID in Google applications will still appear.

On the second question, he said that the protocol is currently being finalized to allow not only a URL, but also an email address, and, more simply, any line like somebody@somewhere.com. When these changes are made to the protocol, the problem will be decided, Google Account OpenID will look exactly like your address in GMail.

It was a surprise for me that there was a solution regarding the third question. This is WebFinger . In addition, WebFinger may be the answer to the second question. Mark Pilgrim's

story about HTML 5 to me as a person who smoked WhatWG specswhile working on a prototype of web drawing, it was not very interesting, but it aroused great interest and animation 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. :-)