Google Australia: Unleashing New APIs To Developers World-Wide

It's been a crazy few months in the Google Sydney office, as the two main engineering teams here have been busy prepping products for launch - and all of them targeted at developers like you! On the first day of Google I/O, Google's biggest developer event of the year, the Maps API team announced Google Maps API v3. This new API has been designed from scratch with latency and mobile compatibility in mind, and we hope to see it power the mashups of the future.

On the second day of I/O, the Sydney team working on the notorious "secret project" revealed Google Wave and the Wave protocol. Google Wave is in developer preview mode now, and a few thousand developers have started tinkering with the various APIs for creating real-time robots and gadgets.

We held an all-day event in the Google Sydney office last week, where we invited 80 local developers to hack with the Wave team for the day. Here are some of the nifty extensions they came up with:

The Napkin Gadgetembeds a Flash SWF that lets users draw inside the canvas with different colors and line widths. The gadget communicates with the JavaScript Gadgets API via a JS->AS3 bridge, and all the code for that is open-sourced. Perhaps the best part of this gadget is that it works perfectly in playback mode, and you can see how the community doodle has evolved over time:



The Syntaxy robot adds syntax highlighting to valid Python code that it finds in blips. This robot works in perfect synergy with Monty, a bot from another developer that evaluates and returns the result of Python expressions:



The Anti-swear bot cleans up waves by replacing profane words with appropriate substitutions, while the Agreeabl bot replies to all of your blips with words of encouragement (originally created for auto-replying to Twitter followers, a praise-hungry crowd). These bots work also nicely together in a Wave, and when combined with the whimsical Cartoony and Kay bots, nonsensical hilarity ensues:



We had a great time hanging out with those local developers, and we look forward to seeing how APAC developers use our new Aussie-bred APIs to create new real-time, mobile-compatible mashups.

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations