Open Source at Google

Thursday, October 2, 2008 at 3:05 PM

By Zak Cohen and Neil Dunn, Software Engineering Team

Another Thursday. Another London Google Open Source Jam. This time the format couldn't have been simpler: Come to Google. Have some beer, have some pizza. Talk about whatever you like.

Here's the lightning talk roundup. 5 minutes apiece:



Since 5 minutes can seem like a really long time we also introduced something new: Lightspeed talks! Pow! Don't have enough to fill 5 minutes? Don't have slides? Don't worry! Stand up and say your thing. 30 seconds. 5 seconds. A single word perhaps!

Talks start conversations, conversations start projects, projects are good!



Don't know about the London Open Source Jam yet? Where have you been? OS Jam is a free for all, open to anyone, geek night where open source hackers get together to discuss a topic close to their hearts.

Rock on OS Jam! See you next time...

Saturday, March 15, 2008 at 1:54 PM

By Jason Robbins, Open Source Team

In one Dilbert cartoon, Dogbert confronts a long-winded technology "guru" by showing him some actual code, which blows him away. It's funny because it's true: some long, abstract discussions can turn into short, concrete ones when you can point to code.

We recently launched a new source code browsing tool as part of Google Code's project hosting feature. This new tool makes it easy to navigate through a project's Subversion repository. Key features include: fast directory browsing tree, syntax highlighting, history of changes, and easy-to-read diffs. See it yourself under the "Source" tab of any project that we host. For example: Google Gears source code.

We hope you find that the details make this tool a joy to use. For example, it's easy to get straight to the source code of a file, yet still see some of its recent history right on the same page. And, you can flip through revisions of a file with just a click. Stay tuned as the tool matures and evolves into something even more exciting in the months ahead.

Special thanks go to Google intern Jenan Wise for his passion for great software and attention to detail on this tool.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008 at 12:16 AM

By Brad Neuberg, Dojo Contributor and Google Gears Developer Advocate

The Dojo project is a leading open source Ajax framework for developing advanced web applications in JavaScript. Dojo consists of many modules for powerful cross-browser development, such as modules for offline, modules for graphics, and more. One of these modules is known as Dojo Storage.

Dojo Storage makes it possible to store large amounts of data (hundreds or megabytes of K) on the client-side, way beyond the 4K limit of cookies. Developers are given a simple key/value storage abstraction, similar to a hash table. What makes Dojo Storage unique is that it automatically determines the best way to achieve this. If Google Gears, a small open-source plug-in that teaches current browsers new tricks, is present then this will be used for storage; if the browser supports HTML 5 DOM Storage, such as Firefox 2, then this is used; and finally, if none of the others are available, then a hidden Flash applet is used to store the data permanently. There are even Adobe AIR storage providers (thanks to SitePen and Adobe) if you are running in an AIR environment!

Dojo Storage has been around for a few years. However, when Dojo made the big move to the Dojo 1.0 architecture, the Flash and HTML 5 storage providers broke; plus, new versions of Flash and new browsers made the old design inefficient. I have seriously re-factored the Flash storage system to be much faster and simpler and fixed bugs in the HTML 5 and Gears storage systems. There is now a new storage.js profile build that you can grab and include in your page to easily use Dojo Storage with the three main browser storage providers: Gears, HTML 5, and Flash. The new Dojo Storage will come out as part of the Dojo 1.1 release coming soon.

I've created a screen cast demoing the different storage providers in action:



Enjoy!

Wednesday, February 20, 2008 at 1:21 PM

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

We recently hosted the Dojo Developer Day here at Google. Dojo is one of the leading open-source Ajax/JavaScript toolkits, and it was great getting to see many of the core Dojo contributors and users from around the country. Brad Neuberg, a Dojo contributor and Developer Advocate for Google Gears, had the following writeup:

Dojo Developer Day, also known as DDD, was a great success this year!

On day one we started with a rundown of successes from 2007: massive refactoring of Dojo into a much smaller, faster system; major improvements to accessibility and internationalization in Dijit, the Dojo widget system; and exciting new features around the Dojo Grid, charting libraries, Dojo.Data, and Dojo Offline.

After reviewing 2007 (including finding out about three new Dojo books coming out soon!), we moved on to setting direction for 2008 and Dojo 1.1, the next release. Every team member gave short updates on where their package is at and where they are going. James Burke of AOL showed off his work on allowing multiple versions of Dojo to work on the same page, while Bill Keese of IBM, Torrey Rice of SitePen, and Nikolai Onken gave us the lowdown on Dijit 1.1 and their improvements to the Dijit themes and look. I'm the module maintainer for Dojo Offline, Dojo Storage, and Dojo Flash, so checked in on the status of these and future directions; expect to see Dojo Flash and the Flash Storage Provider working again with the Dojo 1.0 architecture and a new release of Dojo Offline in the near-future (post Dojo 1.1 on both however).

Adam Peller at IBM showed us the new BorderContainer layout model that makes it easier to construct layouts, while Dustin Machi at SitePen revealed the exciting work he is doing on the JSON-RPC system. Neil Roberts of SitePen has ported Django's templating language to JavaScript (!), doing some nifty things around the build system to make it easy to use while efficient in production, while Eugene Lazutkin of SitePen continues to amaze us all with his cross-browser Dojo graphics work and charting APIs. Eugene expressed interest in playing around with Google Gears to create 2D and 3D Gears modules to make this stuff easier and more powerful; jump on the Google Gears developer mailing list to join the discussion and coding.



I could go on and on; there were so many great checkins and exciting developments on just the first day that I can't list them all here; Alex Russell has an in-depth blog post that goes into the nitty-gritty of all the great work everyone did.

The rest of DDD day one and two were dedicated to demos of cool applications folks are building using Dojo, including a new version of AOL Mail^TM based on Dojo, and serious code hacking during the day to fix Dojo bugs. I spent much of the time during the hackathon refactoring Dojo Flash to work again (it regressed when we jumped from Dojo 0.4 to Dojo 0.9). It's always great to get to work face-to-face with all the names I see fly by on the Dojo mailing lists and Subversion checkins. Thanks to everyone for making DDD a success!

First time to Dojo? Want to be a collaborator and Dojo contributor? Check out the free online Dojo Book and our Contributor Guidelines and mailing lists.