Below are the key announcements made at the Google I/O;
Enabling Cloud Portability with Google App Engine for Business and VMware – The company today announced Google App Engine for Business, with a host of new features to help enterprises run their business applications on Google’s infrastructure (read this blog post to learn more). Google also announced its work with VMware to connect the developer tools, making it possible to create rich, multi-device web applications that can be hosted in a variety of Java-compatible hosting environments. Call it cloud portability for the enterprise — productively build apps that you can deploy onto Google App Engine for Business, a VMware environment (your vSphere infrastructure, your choice of vCloud partners, or VMforce), or other infrastructure such as Amazon EC2.
As part of this announcement, Google is providing early access to these tools — you can start using them right now by downloading the latest milestone version of VMware’s SpringSource Tool Suite (STS). If you prefer to wait for the general release, you can sign up to be notified.
Spring Roo- With Spring Roo, a next-generation rapid application development tool, Java developers can easily build full applications in minutes, using the Java Persistence API (JPA) to connect to new or existing databases. Roo outputs standard Java code, so it’s easy to refine the back end with the SpringSource Tool Suite and the front end with the Google Web Toolkit SDK, using Roo as much or as little as desired.
Google Web Toolkit SDK – New data presentation widgets in Google Web Toolkit speed development of traditional enterprise applications, increase performance and interactivity for enterprise users, and make it much easier to create engaging mobile apps with a fraction of the investment previously required.
SpringSource Tool Suite- Using the Eclipse-based SpringSource Tool Suite, developers can now choose to deploy their application in their current VMware vSphere environment, in VMware vCloud, directly to Google App Engine for Business, or elsewhere. We call this cloud portability.
Google Web Toolkit Speed Tracer- Speed Tracer now helps developers identify and fix performance problems not only in the client and network portions of their apps, but also on the server. By incorporating server-side time traces from both Spring Insight and Google App Engine AppStats, Speed Tracer provides a consolidated view of where sluggishness actually comes from — be it client, network, or server — so it’s much easier to see what to fix.
If you’re building business apps, we hope you’ll find these tools make it easier and more fun to get your job done. Maybe you’ll save time and money by developing and testing apps on App Engine, and then deploying to your VMware environment. Maybe you’ll run a second instance of your apps on App Engine for disaster recovery. Or, maybe you’ll take your existing on-premise apps and extend them to the web and to mobile devices in a fraction of the time it might have otherwise taken. The point is, whatever you decide, you can be confident that it’s possible, and that you’re not locked in.
You can download the latest milestone version of STS and try these tools for yourself.
Google App Engine for Business – Google also announced Google App Engine for Business. Google App Engine for Business lets organizations build and maintain their applications on the same scalable architecture that powers Google applications, with added management and support features tailored specifically for the enterprise.
Google App Engine for Business introduces a number of new features that our enterprise customers have been asking for, including:
With these new features, the company is making it easier for businesses to take advantage of the core benefits of Google App Engine: easy development using languages you already know (Java and Python); simple administration, with no need to worry about hardware, patches or backups; and effortless scalability, automatically getting the capacity you need when you need it. Google App Engine for Business is currently in preview, opened to a limited number of enterprises. Learn more about how you can participate, and check our roadmap to follow features as they become available.
Introducing the Google Font API & Google Font Directory – The company announced a collection of high quality open source web fonts in the Google Font Directory, and the Google Font API to make them available to everybody on the web. For a long time, the web has lagged print and even other electronic media in typographic sophistication. To enjoy the visual richness of diverse fonts, webmasters have resorted to workarounds such as baking text into images. Thanks to browser support for web fonts, this is rapidly changing. Web fonts, enabled by the CSS3 @font-face standard, are hosted in the cloud and sent to browsers as needed.Google has been working with a number of talented font designers to produce a varied collection of high quality open source fonts for the Google Font Directory. With the Google Font API, using these fonts on your web page is almost as easy as using the standard set of so-called “web-safe” fonts that come installed on most computers.
The Google Font API provides a simple, cross-browser method for using any font in the Google Font Directory on your web page. The fonts have all the advantages of normal text: in addition to being richer visually, text styled in web fonts is still searchable, scales crisply when zoomed, and is accessible to users using screen readers.
Getting started using the Google Font API is easy. Just add a couple lines of HTML:
<href=’http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Tangerine’ rel=’stylesheet’ type=’text/css’>
body { font-family: ‘Tangerine’, serif; }
The Google Font API hides a lot of complexity behind the scenes. Google’s serving infrastructure takes care of converting the font into a format compatible with any modern browser (including Internet Explorer 6 and up), sends just the styles and weights you select, and the font files and CSS are tuned and optimized for web serving. For example, cache headers are set to maximize the likelihood that the fonts will be served from the browser’s cache with no need for a network roundtrip, even when the same font is linked from different websites.
These fonts also work well with CSS3 and HTML5 styling, including drop shadows, rotation, etc. In addition, selecting these fonts in your CSS works just the same as for locally installed fonts, facilitating clean separation of content and presentation.
The fonts in the Google Font Directory come from a diverse array of designers, including open source developers and highly regarded type designers, and also include the highly acclaimed Droid Sans and Droid Serif fonts, designed by Ascender Corporation as a custom font for Android. We invite you to browse through the directory and get to know the fonts and designers better. Since all the fonts are open source, you can use them any way you like. We also have a separate project hosted on Google Code for downloading the original font files. Since they’re open source, they can be used for just about any purpose, including for print.
We’re hoping designers will contribute many more fonts in coming months to the Google Font Directory. If you’re a designer and are interested in contributing your font, get in touch with us by completing this form.
To showcase the Google Font API, Smashing Magazine has relaunched their site using the open source Droid font hosted by Google. We’re excited about the potential for integrating the Google Font API into many types of publications and web applications. For example, the new themes for Google Spreadsheet forms are a great example of a rich visual experience using web fonts.
This is just the beginning for web fonts. Today, Google is only supporting Western European languages (Latin-1), and the company expects to support a number of diverse languages shortly.
All information in the post of from the Google Blog…so all credit goes to the Google team.
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