[mashup-dev] Summary on Google Developer Day - Gadgets

[Ajith Ranabahu]

Hi,
Here is the summary on Google gadgets sessions which I omitted from
the last mail


Google gadgets is a way of producing small widgets that either run as
part of a web page or a part of the local desktop. Gadgets do provide
nice and fun ways of delivering content and most people find it
reallly cool since they can add an remove gadgets very easily (as the
google guys put it - its 'extreme focus on user experience'). Google
seems to have mastered this and here is a summary of the things I've
learnet in the gadgets sessions.

1. Gadgets are of two types, universal gadgets and desktop gadgets.
while the universal gadgets are more like html content with an xml
wrapper, desktop gadgets run using google desktop runtime and are more
powetful in terms of their ability to use the Google desktop and
google talk API's to work with the local machine. Google destop API
primarily includes a communication API, events API and a query API.
The universal gadgets however can be used in both the desktop and your
igoogle home page but their functionality in the desktop environment
will not be more sophisticated than its web page equivalent.

2. Google desktop gadget designer is a tool that makes gadget creation
fast and simple.

3. Communication API works on the gtalk framework! This is a cool idea
and they've done cool things with it. One possibility is mutiuser
games. Underneath it boils down to just passing text using the XMPP
protocol, but creative people has used this API to many interesting
uses. If the XMPP transport in Axis2 is upto the job, we can device a
way of delivering web service content through gadgets :) Other API's
rely on the google desktop support  - say to access the index created
by google deektop program.

4. The desktop gadgets do seem have certain security risks since once
the gadget is installed it can access the content of the local file
system etc without restrictions.

The mashup editor allows you to directly export a universal gadget out
of your mashup. So instead of making a web site out of it, you can
actually send it to user desktops instead.

On a somewhat unrelated note I've had a chat with Jeff Huber, Googles
director for Engineering (He is such a cool and humble guy) and he
mentioned that they decided to drop the SOAP interface for search
because they saw the world going the other way. Right now Google has
only one SOAP interface, the Adwords API. The reason is that the use
of adwords is primarily with enterprise customers. In Googles mind if
the target audience is a non-enterprise community they use a RESTish
API (more like the Atom based API in gdata). They tend to put the SOAP
interfaces only on the services that they want to expose to the more
enterprisy customers.

Thanks

-- 
Ajith Ranabahu