Google Code Review: OWF, Content Licenses, Secure Ajax APIs, CalDAV and more

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

How do you like your Code Review? Choose from text to audio (iTunes) and video.



We have had a varied couple of weeks, so I decided to turn on the camera, even though I am in Eldora, Colorado, up in the mountains.

First up, the Open Web Foundation. I discuss the new foundation and what it is trying to accomplish (not another standards org!).

Then we stay on the topic of the Open Web and browsers, and how Vladimir Vukićević has an promising implementation of Canvas in IE. excanvas has done this for awhile by first emulating VML, and more recently with a Silverlight bridge. Vladimir is a Mozilla hacker, and he managed to shoehorn the Firefox Canvas code in via an <object>.

We have worked out how to license our code, but what about the other stuff that a project has? What about the documentation, the samples, the protocols? The Google Code team now allows you to choose a content license to cover those bases. Just a simple drop down away in your project hosting area.

Elsewhere, in Google Code land, the code review tool that we talked about early has now made its way to Google Code. Now you can say "Looks Good To Me" to your buddies source code as he puts in a new commit on your new opensource project.

One of the most requested features on Google Code is more RSS feeds, and we have obliged with support for issues, downloads, subversion changes, and wiki updates.

Now you have the new tools, how about searching over that large amount of code that we are putting out there? Code Search just got a lot better with rich outlines showing you meta data on the file that you are in, and hyperlinking includes and such.

Moving to Ajax and the Web for a second. One of the common requests that we have had since we launched the AJAX Libraries API, is to be able to access the Google hosted popular opensource libraries on https as well. And, now we do. If your application is on https and you don't want users to see any "mixed content" messages, go ahead and use https on us too!

Google XML Pages (GXP) is a templating system we use at Google. Its main focus is markup: we mostly use it for generating HTML and XHTML, but it can work with other flavors of XML, like Atom, KML, and RSS. It also has some support for a few non-markup languages (JavaScript, CSS and plain text), though mostly for embedding them within markup.

Check it out and see how some of the Google products do the view side of MVC on the Web.

I didn't even know that Google Health was built using GWT, so it was interesting to read a retrospective on the decision.

What else has been going on?

Here are a few random things:

• Google Calendar supports CalDAV: This is experimental, but means that you can kick up iCal and have bi-directional sync.
• QR Code in Charts API: QR codes are 2D bar codes. You can store anything you want, but commonly people put URLs and contact information in there, that mobile phones can quickly scan.

Finally, Google Developer Day is coming to Europe, so if you are in that neck of the woods in September and October, please stop by!