New Article Released: Playing Nice With Google

My newest article for php|architect has been published today and can be grabbed from their website for a low low Canadian price. This month it's "Playing Nice With Google" in which I explore the basics of the GData API for communicating with some of Google's basic data services. They actually have quite a few of their services set up on GData, which opens up a world of programming possibilities.

In exploring the format and its features for the article, I was actually quite impressed by it overall. It makes sense, its a relatively simple standard that can extended to meet the unique needs of whichever application is implementing it as its API format - which brings to mind an interesting point. By all accounts, the API standard is not proprietary to Google and is open to implementation by any application out there. Yet I haven't seen much of any GData-compatible APIs out there since it would seem many sites and developers prefer to do something home-grown if they open their application at all. I, for one, intend to create a GData-based API for applications I'm building at work. We're still in the early days of the open and API'd web - but I appreciate services like GData to get us there.

A whole book could be written around playing nice with Google for web managers and developers - they have dozens of APIs across a range of technologies and I want to play with them all. In this case, we focused on what PHP developers can quickly dive into - GData:

Playing Nice With ... Google

Google CEO Eric Schmidt commented in a New York Times article, back in December 2007, that 90% of people’s computing needs can and will someday be handled in the Web-based cloud.

Much of that functionality is quickly getting there, as Google and others develop services that undermine Microsoft’s core products and reach out to consumers, individual professionals, small business owners, consultants, cross-border and cross-company teams, and even some larger companies and universities. The movement from the desktop to the virtual space has been on the horizon for some time and, thanks to advanced Rich Internet Application technologies like the Flex and Ajax libraries, is fast becoming a reality.

However, Web 2.0 is not merely about supplanting our desktop icons with bookmarks. New technologies should improve the way we do things, not merely swap out one information silo for another. In order to truly create a new working paradigm where information can be shared, distributed, manipulated, referenced and expanded upon, we need to be able to get at the information in the first place. Enter Web Services—a topic that has frequently graced these pages over the last few years. Freely opening up our architectures in a controlled and secure manner brings fresh ideas far beyond anything we could have come up with by ourselves.

Read more of the article in the magazine - available in print and digital formats.