Google Mini, the IT mammoth's big blue search appliance rack just got a little better as its maker have now added a few new features and extended its language support. Google Mini's updates include source and date biasing, the ability to find files stored shared servers quicker and six more languages - Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Hungarian, and Polish.
For more info about Google Mini and what it can offer check out this corner of Google's world.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Google modernizes Web software tool
Google plans to release later this week a near-final version of the Google Web Toolkit 1.5, software designed to ease the onerous parts of writing sophisticated Web-based software.
GWT 1.5 includes support for Java 5, a version of the Sun Microsystems programming language released in 2006, and produces software that runs about 1.2 to 2 times faster for complex Web applications, said Bruce Johnson, Google's engineering manager for GWT.
The new software fuels Google's ambition to make the Web a much richer software environment--an ambition on display Wednesday and Thursday at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. Johnson believes the Web is already "really close" to the abilities of personal computers as a software foundation.
"We've observed that there's no question anymore whether you're going to target the browser or a desktop app. For almost any new exciting app, you're going to target the browser," Johnson said. "For the right set of applications, it's already better than what you can do on the desktop. For extremely low-latency applications, like video editing, I think we're still a couple years out."
Google is trying to shift people toward the Web, hoping to profit indirectly by spurring more Internet searches, its main source of revenue. It's also got some direct but much smaller businesses, including subscription fees for corporate use of online Google Apps such as its spreadsheet and calendar. Also at Google I/O, the company is revealing the fees for heavy users of its new Google App Engine service to host Web applications.
App Engine, which was unveiled in April and now has about 60,000 approved users, is free for starter applications requiring 500MB of storage and network bandwidth to support about 5 million page views a month, Google said. On Wednesday, the service will be open to the 150,000 who've signed up so far and to any others who want to join.
Beyond that, Google will charge 10 to 12 cents per hour of processor core work, plus 15 to 18 cents per gigabyte of storage per month, plus 11 to 13 cents per gigabyte of data transferred out, plus 9 to 11 cents per gigabyte of data transferred in. The fees are similar in broad structure to that of a competing service from Amazon.
GWT: Doing the grunt work
GWT lets programmers write their code in Java, but then converts that raw material into the JavaScript language that's built into Web browsers. One advantage of GWT is that it can handle the significant differences in how different browsers handle JavaScript, Google argues.
"Not all the JavaScript standards are interpreted in different ways," Johnson said. "The truth is it's a minefield."
GWT supports most modern browsers, including recent versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari (and other Webkit-based browsers such as that of the iPhone and Google Android), and Opera.
Sun introduced more changes to Java with the current Java 6, but it was Java 5 that introduced several changes to the language. Among them (brace yourself if you're not a coder): generics, enumerated types, annotations, enhanced for/loop syntax, and autoboxing.
Supporting those newer features makes GWT less different from other Java programming environments, cuts down on opportunities for programmer mistakes, and can help GWT produce faster JavaScript, Johnson said.
GWT uses the Eclipse project's JDT to understand people's Java code, then adds a Google-engineered component that translates it into JavaScript, Johnson said.
It's open-source software, and "We get dozens and dozens of patches" from outside contributors. Among those in the current release is support for right-to-left languages such as Arabic.
GWT 1.5 includes support for Java 5, a version of the Sun Microsystems programming language released in 2006, and produces software that runs about 1.2 to 2 times faster for complex Web applications, said Bruce Johnson, Google's engineering manager for GWT.
The new software fuels Google's ambition to make the Web a much richer software environment--an ambition on display Wednesday and Thursday at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. Johnson believes the Web is already "really close" to the abilities of personal computers as a software foundation.
"We've observed that there's no question anymore whether you're going to target the browser or a desktop app. For almost any new exciting app, you're going to target the browser," Johnson said. "For the right set of applications, it's already better than what you can do on the desktop. For extremely low-latency applications, like video editing, I think we're still a couple years out."
Google is trying to shift people toward the Web, hoping to profit indirectly by spurring more Internet searches, its main source of revenue. It's also got some direct but much smaller businesses, including subscription fees for corporate use of online Google Apps such as its spreadsheet and calendar. Also at Google I/O, the company is revealing the fees for heavy users of its new Google App Engine service to host Web applications.
App Engine, which was unveiled in April and now has about 60,000 approved users, is free for starter applications requiring 500MB of storage and network bandwidth to support about 5 million page views a month, Google said. On Wednesday, the service will be open to the 150,000 who've signed up so far and to any others who want to join.
Beyond that, Google will charge 10 to 12 cents per hour of processor core work, plus 15 to 18 cents per gigabyte of storage per month, plus 11 to 13 cents per gigabyte of data transferred out, plus 9 to 11 cents per gigabyte of data transferred in. The fees are similar in broad structure to that of a competing service from Amazon.
GWT: Doing the grunt work
GWT lets programmers write their code in Java, but then converts that raw material into the JavaScript language that's built into Web browsers. One advantage of GWT is that it can handle the significant differences in how different browsers handle JavaScript, Google argues.
"Not all the JavaScript standards are interpreted in different ways," Johnson said. "The truth is it's a minefield."
GWT supports most modern browsers, including recent versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari (and other Webkit-based browsers such as that of the iPhone and Google Android), and Opera.
Sun introduced more changes to Java with the current Java 6, but it was Java 5 that introduced several changes to the language. Among them (brace yourself if you're not a coder): generics, enumerated types, annotations, enhanced for/loop syntax, and autoboxing.
Supporting those newer features makes GWT less different from other Java programming environments, cuts down on opportunities for programmer mistakes, and can help GWT produce faster JavaScript, Johnson said.
GWT uses the Eclipse project's JDT to understand people's Java code, then adds a Google-engineered component that translates it into JavaScript, Johnson said.
It's open-source software, and "We get dozens and dozens of patches" from outside contributors. Among those in the current release is support for right-to-left languages such as Arabic.
A Few Google Tips
In my last post, I talked a little bit about QuickBase’s non-typical Google Analytics implementation. During my time spent investigating how to properly implement the GATC (Google Analytics Tracking Code) on our site, I learned a few nifty things that I thought I’d share.
Make Tracking Dynamic Url’s Pretty
If your site does something like append a session ID to a page url, your probably seeing clicks to the same page look like clicks to different urls with the data showing up in Google like:
/page.php?sessionid=A2DB4BHe554ERG5
/page.php?sessionid=RG4577H891HH677
/page.php?sessionid=345J10R5BM56TH5
In reality, you want visitor data for page.php rolled up into just “page.php” and you probably don’t want to see the sessionid (or whatever dynamic data you have appended to the url).
Fixing this is pretty easy. In your GATC, you’re probably making a call that looks like this:
1
pageTracker._trackPageview();
If you use the default GATC, like in the example above, Google will look at whatever the url is and go with that. In other words, pages with dynamic data appended will continue to look like different urls.
The solution is a rather easy one:
1
pageTracker._trackPageview("page.php");
That’s pretty much it. Just feed in the string you want Google to call this page. You can tell Google to call the page whatever you want, even if the page was actually called page.php!
You can read more on this here.
Track Outbound Link Clicks
Google can track any clicks on outbound links you may have on your site, even if that site doesn’t have the GATC installed. This may come in useful if you’re purposefully driving traffic to a third-party for whatever reason. Here’s how you do it:
First, you need to turn on the feature. To do this, you need to add _setAllowLinker(true) to the default GATC implementation like so:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Once you’ve made that modification, you can add some javascript to your outbound link and start getting the click data.
1
Notice that you can specify how you want the click data to look in Google. If you follow the methodology used in this example, all of your outbound links will look like they were clicked from a folder on your domain called “outgoing”. This makes finding outbound click data much easier if you’ve got a lot of them.
Here’s the Google support page on this topic.
Keep Your Data Private
In April, Google launched a new data sharing policy at around the same time they updated the GATC with several new features. If you’re like us, you want to keep your site data private. Here’s how to do it:
* Login to your Google Analytics Account and select the account you wish to modify from the drop-down in the upper right
* In the upper-left, click on “Edit Account and Data Sharing Settings”
* Selected your desired Data Sharing Settings and hit “Save Changes”
Of course, you don’t have to keep your data completely locked down.
Here are the options:
Share with Google Products only - For example, you would allow this if you wanted to share analytics data with Adwords (for use with Google’s Conversion Optimizer perhaps)
Anonymously Share with Google products and the benchmarking service
With this option enabled, Google will remove any identifiable information from your analytics information and use it for benchmarking and to improve upon its existing products/services.
Do Not Share will disallow Google from using your analytics data internally and it will disallow you from using the data within other Google products and services.
Hope you find these tips useful!
Make Tracking Dynamic Url’s Pretty
If your site does something like append a session ID to a page url, your probably seeing clicks to the same page look like clicks to different urls with the data showing up in Google like:
/page.php?sessionid=A2DB4BHe554ERG5
/page.php?sessionid=RG4577H891HH677
/page.php?sessionid=345J10R5BM56TH5
In reality, you want visitor data for page.php rolled up into just “page.php” and you probably don’t want to see the sessionid (or whatever dynamic data you have appended to the url).
Fixing this is pretty easy. In your GATC, you’re probably making a call that looks like this:
1
pageTracker._trackPageview();
If you use the default GATC, like in the example above, Google will look at whatever the url is and go with that. In other words, pages with dynamic data appended will continue to look like different urls.
The solution is a rather easy one:
1
pageTracker._trackPageview("page.php");
That’s pretty much it. Just feed in the string you want Google to call this page. You can tell Google to call the page whatever you want, even if the page was actually called page.php!
You can read more on this here.
Track Outbound Link Clicks
Google can track any clicks on outbound links you may have on your site, even if that site doesn’t have the GATC installed. This may come in useful if you’re purposefully driving traffic to a third-party for whatever reason. Here’s how you do it:
First, you need to turn on the feature. To do this, you need to add _setAllowLinker(true) to the default GATC implementation like so:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Once you’ve made that modification, you can add some javascript to your outbound link and start getting the click data.
1
Notice that you can specify how you want the click data to look in Google. If you follow the methodology used in this example, all of your outbound links will look like they were clicked from a folder on your domain called “outgoing”. This makes finding outbound click data much easier if you’ve got a lot of them.
Here’s the Google support page on this topic.
Keep Your Data Private
In April, Google launched a new data sharing policy at around the same time they updated the GATC with several new features. If you’re like us, you want to keep your site data private. Here’s how to do it:
* Login to your Google Analytics Account and select the account you wish to modify from the drop-down in the upper right
* In the upper-left, click on “Edit Account and Data Sharing Settings”
* Selected your desired Data Sharing Settings and hit “Save Changes”
Of course, you don’t have to keep your data completely locked down.
Here are the options:
Share with Google Products only - For example, you would allow this if you wanted to share analytics data with Adwords (for use with Google’s Conversion Optimizer perhaps)
Anonymously Share with Google products and the benchmarking service
With this option enabled, Google will remove any identifiable information from your analytics information and use it for benchmarking and to improve upon its existing products/services.
Do Not Share will disallow Google from using your analytics data internally and it will disallow you from using the data within other Google products and services.
Hope you find these tips useful!
Microsoft Aims to School Google Collegiate Apps
Microsoft adds Exchange Labs e-mail to its Live@edu solution in an effort to keep pace with Google in online apps.
With Google Apps Education Edition gaining market traction in thousands of universities across the country, Microsoft can ill afford to rest on its lofty on-premises software laurels.
The software giant, looking to make inroads against Google Apps in the SAAS(software as a service) market, May 27 said it is providing its Microsoft Exchange Labs hosted e-mail applications free for university students and alumni.
Microsoft Exchange Labs is now part of Live@edu, a Microsoft R&D communications and collaboration project based on Microsoft Exchange Server.
An alternative to the education editions of Google Apps and Yahoo's Zimbra e-mail service, Microsoft Live@edu includes Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger, Microsoft Office Live Workspace and Windows Live SkyDrive online storage, which lets users share documents and photos.
Students can use these tools to communicate with each other and teachers through e-mail and instant messaging. Students also can use Live@edu to complete coursework solo or to collaborate on group projects using the Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications in Office Live Workspace.
Since Live@edu launched in March 2005, 2,000 universities and colleges in 86 countries have enrolled in the program. These include UNINOVE, a large university in Brazil that boasts more than 70,000 students, and Kagoshima University in Japan, which deployed Live@edu for its 16,000 users.
Google claims millions of students and faculty at more than 6,000 universities are using Google Apps.
Students Demand Alternatives
With Exchange Labs in the Live@edu mix, universities will be able to provide students with hosted e-mail with up to 10GB inboxes and 20MB attachments, Bruce Gabrielle, senior product manager for Microsoft's Live @edu software, told eWEEK. Students can now also access their e-mail, contacts and calendar from Outlook Web Access and Microsoft Office Outlook, as well as from mobile phones with Exchange Labs.
Gabrielle said Microsoft launched Live@edu after a buildup of student demands for alternatives to proprietary e-mail systems, or even as an alternative to Microsoft's Exchange-driven Outlook system.
Microsoft used Hotmail in some cases to solve the problem, but for students using mobile phones all the time, a more comprehensive suite of communication and collaboration software was necessary.
Other features of the service include shared calendars (with Exchange Labs, users cannot see Google's free/busy calendar, but can send and receive meeting invites from Google Calendar); student directories that enable administrative control to create distribution lists; and the ability to add faculty and staff who are using on-premises Exchange to student directories.
Security is of paramount importance at any institution, so Live@edu with Exchange Labs also allows message tracking to confirm that e-mails were delivered and includes content filtering so that admins can quash e-mails with offensive content.
Hotmail Alternative by 2010
Exchange Labs comes as Microsoft, Google and Yahoo are locked in a titanic battle for the education e-mail sector, Gartner analyst Matt Cain said in a research note.
"Exchange is a richer platform than Hotmail, [so] it represents a more competitive offering than the Google platform," Cain wrote. "The ... Exchange Labs option also allows Microsoft to test new Exchange features and functionality at high volumes, and is designed to perform better in a hosted environment than the current version of Exchange (Exchange 2007, SP1)."
Cain said he expects Exchange Labs will replace Hotmail at universities by 2010 and noted that the advantages of running Exchange Labs rather than Gmail for students (while running Exchange on premises) include a common global address list that makes address look up easier and a consistent end-user and IT staff experience.
With Google Apps Education Edition gaining market traction in thousands of universities across the country, Microsoft can ill afford to rest on its lofty on-premises software laurels.
The software giant, looking to make inroads against Google Apps in the SAAS(software as a service) market, May 27 said it is providing its Microsoft Exchange Labs hosted e-mail applications free for university students and alumni.
Microsoft Exchange Labs is now part of Live@edu, a Microsoft R&D communications and collaboration project based on Microsoft Exchange Server.
An alternative to the education editions of Google Apps and Yahoo's Zimbra e-mail service, Microsoft Live@edu includes Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger, Microsoft Office Live Workspace and Windows Live SkyDrive online storage, which lets users share documents and photos.
Students can use these tools to communicate with each other and teachers through e-mail and instant messaging. Students also can use Live@edu to complete coursework solo or to collaborate on group projects using the Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications in Office Live Workspace.
Since Live@edu launched in March 2005, 2,000 universities and colleges in 86 countries have enrolled in the program. These include UNINOVE, a large university in Brazil that boasts more than 70,000 students, and Kagoshima University in Japan, which deployed Live@edu for its 16,000 users.
Google claims millions of students and faculty at more than 6,000 universities are using Google Apps.
Students Demand Alternatives
With Exchange Labs in the Live@edu mix, universities will be able to provide students with hosted e-mail with up to 10GB inboxes and 20MB attachments, Bruce Gabrielle, senior product manager for Microsoft's Live @edu software, told eWEEK. Students can now also access their e-mail, contacts and calendar from Outlook Web Access and Microsoft Office Outlook, as well as from mobile phones with Exchange Labs.
Gabrielle said Microsoft launched Live@edu after a buildup of student demands for alternatives to proprietary e-mail systems, or even as an alternative to Microsoft's Exchange-driven Outlook system.
Microsoft used Hotmail in some cases to solve the problem, but for students using mobile phones all the time, a more comprehensive suite of communication and collaboration software was necessary.
Other features of the service include shared calendars (with Exchange Labs, users cannot see Google's free/busy calendar, but can send and receive meeting invites from Google Calendar); student directories that enable administrative control to create distribution lists; and the ability to add faculty and staff who are using on-premises Exchange to student directories.
Security is of paramount importance at any institution, so Live@edu with Exchange Labs also allows message tracking to confirm that e-mails were delivered and includes content filtering so that admins can quash e-mails with offensive content.
Hotmail Alternative by 2010
Exchange Labs comes as Microsoft, Google and Yahoo are locked in a titanic battle for the education e-mail sector, Gartner analyst Matt Cain said in a research note.
"Exchange is a richer platform than Hotmail, [so] it represents a more competitive offering than the Google platform," Cain wrote. "The ... Exchange Labs option also allows Microsoft to test new Exchange features and functionality at high volumes, and is designed to perform better in a hosted environment than the current version of Exchange (Exchange 2007, SP1)."
Cain said he expects Exchange Labs will replace Hotmail at universities by 2010 and noted that the advantages of running Exchange Labs rather than Gmail for students (while running Exchange on premises) include a common global address list that makes address look up easier and a consistent end-user and IT staff experience.
Google to preach Web 2.0 gospel to developers
Just because Google so obviously loves the idea of cloud computing, don't think the company doesn't care about what happens at the other end of the network connection, too.
As former President Bill Clinton used to say, there's a third way: Google wants to improve technology on both the server in the cloud and on the client running a Web browser. The search giant will detail its approach to at least 2,800 developers paying to attend the first Google I/O conference this week in San Francisco.
Vic Gundotra, head of developer evangelism and open-source projects at Google
(Credit: Google)There's been a long-running tension among computing companies about where the brains of the computing operation reside. In early years, central servers did all the work and people connected through "dumb terminals" that did nothing but display text. Then the personal computer revolution took off, and companies such as Microsoft whose software ran on these "clients" prospered. Now it's the Internet era, and Google wants a little of both.
"We are going to make the cloud more accessible. And we're going to make the browser more capable," said Vic Gundotra, Google's vice president of engineering in charge of developer evangelism and open-source software.
Clouds and clients and connections, oh my
Google isn't showing its Google I/O cards beforehand, but here's my translation of Gundotra's opening keynote themes--"Client, Connectivity, and the Cloud"--into some specific projects under way at Google. For client, think Google Gears for running Web applications even when offline. For cloud, think Google App Engine, a site to house Web applications. And for connectivity, think Android, the mobile phone software package.
The Android software itself is under development at Google, with help from a number of partners in the Open Handset Alliance. To make that project successful--in particular its promise as an open foundation with a vibrant programming community--there needs to be software for Android, too.
Google has been trying to jump-start the Android developer program. It launched a developer contest that drew 1,788 submissions. I'm guessing Google will announce the winner from the top 50 finalists (and click here for a PDF of the top 50 Android apps in slideware form).
A sample Android application, AndroidGlobalTime
(Credit: Google)More newsworthy, though, is the likelihood of a second software development kit (SDK) for Android. "We are working on those things in the next day or so," Gundotra said of the SDK last week. "Android is a big portion of how we make pervasive connectivity useful."
Google vs. Microsoft
We in the media are doubtless too susceptible to narratives that pit one company against another, but in Google's case, there really is a big rivalry with Microsoft. The search giant is trying to make into reality the fear Microsoft had in the 1990s about Netscape, that the Web browser would supplant the operating system as the way people used their computers.
Gundotra has seen it from both sides. Before joining Google in 2007, he was general manager for platform evangelism at Microsoft, the culmination of a 15-year stint at the company.
But does Google want to dominate the Web platform the way Microsoft has with the operating system platform? Emphatically not, said Gundotra, who took pains to note that the I/O in Google I/O stands for "innovation in the open."
"Today, the most interesting and dominant platform is not the closed, proprietary platforms of the past, but the open Web...It's the platform adopted by all of us because it isn't controlled by any of us," Gundotra said. "Google's motivation is to move the Internet forward as fast as we can."
That's not to say Google isn't interested in bringing home the bacon. But its Web platform work has only an indirect connection to Google's revenue and profits.
Gundotra repeated what's become a familiar refrain to me as I've asked various Google executives about how their initiatives make money: "We have an economic reason to move (the Web) forward. As it gets richer, better apps, it gets more users. More users using more apps leads to more Google searches, and that leads to more revenue for us," he said.
Android is another target aimed at Microsoft. It will become freely available open-source software--or at least 8.6 million of its 11 million lines of code will be--with the specific intent of providing an alternative to Microsoft's mobile version of Windows. Wind River Systems wants to profit from it directly by helping phone companies build it into their products, but Google thus far has voiced no such ambition.
Lighting a fire under Web 2.0
App Engine and Gears together are centerpieces of Google's attempt to bring the Web alive, and we can expect some action there at the conference, too.
But developers are likely to be disappointed in hearing about one area in which they're hungry for news: support for other programming languages besides Python in App Engine. Java, Ruby, PHP, and Perl support are the top four requests in the App Engine issue tracker, and JavaScript, C#, and ColdFusion Markup Language are in the top 25.
"You can assume from that ranking what we're working on, but not what we'll announce next week," Gundotra said. And he wouldn't offer a specific time frame. "We're actively working on it. It's difficult for us to know until development gets further along."
The company is pleased with the progress so far. It's granted App Engine access to 60,000 developers so far, said Tom Stocky, director of product management for developer products.
Gundotra promises that App Engine isn't a lock-in strategy to lure application developers irreversibly to Google's part of the cloud.
"It is hosting the same open LAMP stack people are used to," he said, referring to the combination of the Linux operating system, Apache Web server software, MySQL database software, and Perl, Python, and PHP programming languages to run Web applications themselves. "If you decide you don't want to use it, you could easily revert back to using your own data center."
Well, maybe not easily. App Engine ties into the Google-only BigTable service for housing data. But the company is working on an export ability for data, and there's an open-source implementation of BigTable, Stocky said.
Giving Gears
The company claims to be equally giving with Google Gears, an open-source project that Google released in beta version to enable richer Internet applications. Specifically, it lets browsers store data better in a local database, work offline, synchronize once they're online again, and run JavaScript more efficiently.
It's hard to find Google Gears used beyond Google Docs, Zoho's competing online office applications, and Google Reader. Gundotra is happy to declare the project a success in another way, though: its influence on version 5 of HTML. Indeed, a draft of the HTML 5 specification includes interfaces for handling database storage and offline work.
"You're right on the cusp of seeing a slew of apps come out that use the HTML 5 and Gears features that redefine what a Web app can do," Gundotra said. "We're working to drive that innovation, and also to drive that back into standards...We think we contributed to the evolution of the Web."
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