Developer outreach matters

I was at an alumni (Columbia U.) sposored event at the Google campus speaking with the local alumni club president who works for Yahoo. At some point in the discussion I mentioned to him that Google has done a spectacular job of reaching out to developers in both the traditional sense - tools and support - and in the marketing sense. What I meant was that Google makes is sexy and cool to be developing on the Google platform.

Where as connecting up with many other platforms is just work, somehow Google makes you feel like you are part of the in crowd. And this matters. Yahoo for example has some some technically excellent components and APIs for application developers to use, but developers in the many tens of thousands are being wooed to the camp every day.

So what is Google is doing? Here's a few things I've noticed:
1. they will sponsor anything that looks like it's interesting to developers
2. seminars and learning opportunities on their campus and sponsored conferences
3. unbelievably good support in their user forums for developer API's
4. really good APIs that are relevant and constantly improving

It's not that the others don't do these things, they just don't do them as well.
And based on converstaions I've had with a couple of Google's competitors, they know this.

Google's GWT, harder than ever to ignore

Google's GWT platform has had a release candidate for version 1.5 available for a little while. I took some time to review it this weekend to see what it offered my company's product development and to understand when we should switch over. I was nothing short of amazed at what the 1.5 version will bring to the developer.

Let me start out by saying 1.5 isn't bringing some wonderful new set of widgets to the table, that's not what GWT is about. There is an army of folks out there creating widget libraries on top of GWT (see resource links below). What the GWT is about is changing the face of web development, bringing an engineering mindset to the client development and creating the best platform for doing that and oh, by the way, not sacrificing on performance or design. Wow!

So back to GWT 1.5. There are key improvements here that are going to give GWT even broader appeal.

1. Performance, performance, performance - the GWT team make very convincing argument (with proof statements) that handcoded javascript is unlikely to be faster and for larger projects it will be slower that GWT
2. Java 5 syntax - programmer sanity (let me tell you how much it sucks to put on the 1.4 waders to write code for GWT, this is a biggie)
3. Overlay mapping - this capabiliy is key to integrating external components written in javascript, any javascript/json library/object can now be mapped directly to java for the GWT with no performance penalty. You get the all the bennies and no hang over
4. Real DOM model - full implementation of the browser DOM model gives you performance, clarity and great performance due to compiler optimizations and some insulation from cross browser stupidity
5. Improved style control - together with the DOM capabilities, no sacrificing on design.

I took some time this weekend to see what would break in my own application (google says it's backward compatible but...) and only a handful of things broke; a couple of definitions in Mapitz GMap2 library and some now (severly) deprecated uses of creating new JSObjects Porting looks like maybe a day's worth of work.

The GWT is already making creating rich applications in a browser easy to do. This next version is only going to give the GWT a lock on this. Benefits over other platforms like Flex or silverlight are that it is open and adaptable. So if you want to use the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) in your GWT application, go ahead. You a Spring Hibernate fanboy it works great (note this is what my team at Abaq.us use) There is already a very large community forming. The last time I checked there were north of 13K folks signed up on the GWT users forum, and there are already a large number of tools and libraries for GWT you can use.

This is a vital community!
A few links to check out:

• The GWTSite Blog (not google)
  
• GWT Forum @ Google Groups
• GWT Tk
• GWT Ext
• Surprisingly Rockin' JavaScript and DOM Programming in GWT

GWT resources can be found at http://code.google.com

Losing Sleep Over Ads on Google Maps?

Let's say you have a website that relies on the Google maps API. Your application is freely available so you don't had to worry about licensing terms (yet), but Google lately has been making some noise about monetizing the maps asset.

• Should you be developing a plan to replace the Gmaps API?
  

For most websites the answer is no, or at most a conditional
maybe. Why is this?

• The grass is not going to be greener on the other map - as soon as google puts ads on maps Yahoo and Microsoft will soon follow suite, not wanting to cede any more ground to Google's already large lead in the advertising race. So moving to one of the other platforms could be a fools run. Spend a bunch of money on moving to another mapping platform only to find that the other platform ain't much better than the one you'e on.


• Google isn't stupid - Only Google knows what their plans really are, but a lot is at stake here. There are something like 150,000 sites using the Google Maps API. This has got to account for a big chunk of the traffic being driven to their site. Why risk pissing off 150,000 partners who already have links pointing right back to Google? It's very likely that the current model is sustainable as is, so why not keep the pressure on your competitors and figure out a way to monetize that is user and partner friendly?


• The map makers and servers can be crowd sourced out of business - There is another solution down the road that isn't spoken about much. It is Open Street Map (OSM) and a new company has just been funded to make that reality happen (Cloud Made), but the OSM content isn't there yet. What Google, Yahoo and Microsoft don't want to do is have an OSM based WikiMap generated that disintermediates them. Definitely not going to happen for years, but why make it happen sooner?


• Worst case, it won't cost that much to get rid of ads - if ads do materialize, we know that Google (and others) will likely provide licensing terms to allow you to 'control ads'. So, if you really hate the ads and your site makes money, you can pay to control them. These enterprise terms aren't really that well firmed up yet though. They seem to change month to month, but that's just an indication that Google itself is trying to evolve the best business model

Worrying about this much? Don't. Figure out what makes your customers happier and use the mapping platform that gets you there.

Unicycling Madman

Ok, so I'm on my lunch ride, more like 5pm or so by the time I got out, but I digress, when I see this guy heading up the creek trail on a giant unicycle. So I whip the trusty iPhone out of my back jersey pocket, remove it from it's safety zip lock bag (I sweat *and* it's dusty) and click off a couple of photos while we ride (2 pushpins @ the end of N. Santa Cruz).

I'm impressed, I really doubt he rides up the two 10%+ grade sections a mile ahead of us, but I didn't stick around to find out either. A sight to see, which you can as I've attached a couple of photos and info about the ride in the map below.


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