Code Review: OAuth, Indexing Flash, Protocol Buffers, Selenium Ice, and more

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

We are trying an experiment, putting up Code Review in a variety of formats, from text to audio (iTunes) and video.



After a great trip to Brazil and Mexico for the Google Developer Day events (Europe in September and October) I am back at it.

There has been some great news in the last week or so, shall we take a peak?

The GData team announced OAuth support around the horn. OAuth is:

An open protocol to allow secure API authentication in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.

And, now you can use the standard to access Google services. This is great, as you can write your applications to the one standard, and have it work across various back-ends.

There was some great news that Google, Yahoo!, and Adobe participated in. We have improved Flash indexing working with Adobe's Searchable SWF library, and some smart algorithms. We can now add URLs that are part of the SWF to the pipeline, and can fire off events to grab more data. This is another improved step (we could grok text in the SWF before) and we hope to see many more as we get better at indexing richer and more varied content on the Web.

There were some good open source releases too:

Kenton Varda discussed the release of Protocol Buffers, a core piece of Google infrastructure as we optimize working with structured data.

We also open sourced the Browser Sync code to see if a community wants to come together to continue to support it.

Testing is tough, and we saw two interesting releases that sit in very different realms of the testing world.

Firstly, the Selenium team produced Selenium Ice a great new way to drive Internet Explorer as you test your Web applications.

Secondly, if you are a C++ developer and you like testing, you may be interested to take a peak at the Google Testing library for C++ that we released.

The GData teams have also come up with a couple more releases to go along with the big OAuth announcement.

The first lies with Google Calendar. You can access your GCal data through GData, but what if you just want a nice visualization of the calendar on your website?

CalVis does just that. You get to customize the look and feel, and the library does the rest.

If you are building rich mashups and happen to access multiple Google services, we have tried to make the UI cleaner for your users. You can now add multiple scopes for both AuthSub and OAuth.

Here is a sample AuthSub URL; Note the space delimited scope:

https://www.google.com/accounts/AuthSubRequest?
       next=http://localhost/authsub
       &scope=http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds%20
              http://picasaweb.google.com/data
       &secure=1
       &session=1

Mrinal Wadhwa flex-ed his muscles to add Gears support to Flex applications via a nice simple library. If you are building Flex applications and want access to the growing Gears components, check it out.

Yesterday was a very Web "3D" day. We released Lively a 3D virtual experience that is the newest addition to Google Labs. It lets you create an avatar and rooms to hang out in. I also saw that Vivaty launched, and some are talking about how virtual worlds are hot in the Valley.

Lively has GTalk integration, and we just released Google talk for iPhone just in time for the new iPhone 3G launch at the end of the week. I will probably head down to one of the Apple Stores and upgrade myself!

As always, thanks for reading, listening, or watching, and let us know if there is anything that you would like to see.