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Advancing cloud computing with integrated developer tools by Google and VMware

Earlier this year at Google I/O, we announced a collaboration between Google and VMware focused on making it easy to build business-oriented, cloud portable web apps. We showed how businesses could use our integrated developer tools to build modern web apps that are “cloud ready” from the start, and can be deployed to any standard environment, including Google App Engine and on VMware vFabric on-premise solutions. Today we are happy to announce that these tools will be generally available within the next few weeks.

Of course, if you’re itching to get a head start, you can jump right in by downloading the release candidate (RC1) versions of the tools. The easiest way to get the entire tool set is to by downloading SpringSource Tool Suite RC1.

If you’d prefer to wait for the general release, you can sign up here to be notified as soon as they are available.

Spring Roo and Google Web Toolkit – Spring Roo, a next generation rapid application development tool, combined with the power of Google Web Toolkit (GWT) enables developers to build rich browser apps in enterprise production environments. These GWT-powered applications leverage modern browser technologies such as AJAX and HTML5 to create the most compelling end-user experience on both desktops and mobile browsers.

Spring Insight and Google Speed Tracer – Google’s Speed Tracer with VMware’s Spring Insight performance tracing technology enable end-to-end performance visibility into cloud applications. This integration provides a holistic view into the web application performance, improving the end-user experience by optimizing the client side as well as the server side.

SpringSource Tool Suite and Google Plugin for Eclipse – The integration of SpringSource Tool Suite and the Google Plugin for Eclipse makes it easy for developers to build and maintain large scale, web-based, enterprise applications, putting tools that were previously only available when building desktop and server solutions in the hands of those building cutting edge web apps.

For a complete “Getting Started” guide, be sure to checkout Getting Started with GWT, Spring Roo, and SpringSource Tool Suite.

Moving forward, both teams are excited about the strides we can make in the mobile web app space. As it stands today, the current technology stack makes it possible to create optimized web apps targeted for the mobile browser. Longer term, we will be looking at incorporating mobile best practices, styled UIs, and HTML5 features such as app cache, local database storage, and geolocation to make the developer and end-user experience first class.

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback and thoughts on this release. Our GWT developer forum is the best place to post this information. Happy coding!

New KMLs for Panoramio photos in Google Earth

Panoramio has just updated their network link KMLs that are used in Google Earth to make them faster and more useful. Not only is the link faster, but “The algorithm that is responsible for distribution and taking care of thumbnail overlaps has been improved as well and that is the reason you will now have a feeling of density that did not exist before, together with a better discoverability of the photos in the layer.”

As you can see in the photo below, the new versions of the KML files show a lot more photos than before:

As they mention in their blog entry about this update, here is how you can download the various KML files:

1. Popular photos in Google Earth: http://www.panoramio.com/map/

(click on the link in the lower-left corner of the Site)

2. Popular photos in Google Earth (Including photos not selected for the Panoramio layer in Google Earth): http://www.panoramio.com/map/

(you need to select the box before downloading the file from the lower-left corner of the Site)

3. Recent Panoramio uploaded photos: http://www.panoramio.com/map/

(select the recent tab and then click on the link in the lower-left corner of the Site)

4. Photos from a specific tag: http://www.panoramio.com/tags

5. Your Photos: Go to your page http://www.panoramio.com/user/user_ID and click on the link that says “in Google Earth”

We’ve talked about Panoramio quite a lot over the past few years, and they get better with each update.

Have you uploaded many photos to them? Will you be adding more now that this feature has become even more useful?

Greetings from Santa Kurara, Kariforunia

Hello from the Unicode Conference in Santa Clara, California, where the Maps Transliteration team is giving a talk about ICU-based transliteration. Transliterating this originally Spanish city name to Japanese, we get サンタ・クララ, which (when morphed back to the Latin writing system) becomes “Santa Kurara.”

Machine Transliteration is an active area of research (slides), which means it can be rather challenging in general. Typically, transliteration emulates the pronunciation, but sometimes it also preserves some aspects of the original written spelling. We created transliteration modules with the open-source ICU library for languages that have highly regular spelling; if you’re using Google Maps in Japanese, Russian or Chinese, you can see how we use it to display labels in both the local language and your own:

Today, we’re announcing the contribution of our ICU transliteration rules for Czech, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak and Spanish to the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository. (For languages with very irregular spelling, like English, we supplement ICU with some more advanced techniques.) If you would like to try writing rules for your own language, have a look at the instructions in the ICU user guide.