Google drops Maps API for Flash

Google is continuing with rationalisation of its product portfolio. This time the axe has fallen on Google Map Flash API. Although the overall number of sites using Flash version of Google Map was relatively small, these were mainly sites offering rich display options, thematic rendering or BI-like dashboards (www.geocommons.com comes to mind as an example). Maps API for Flash applications will continue to function in accordance with Google’s deprecation policy but no new features will be developed, and only critical bugs, regressions, and security issues will be fixed.

Unfortunately, unlike with open source code, due to “cloudy” and proprietary nature of many of Google products developers cannot get the source code and continue on their own.

Google APIs Client Library for .NET

Over the last year, Google launched a number of developer APIs, such as the Tasks API, the Books API, the Search API for Shopping, and the CustomSearch API. At Google I/O we announced a number of developer tools, such as the APIs Explorer and the APIs Console. Over that time, we have been actively developing a library to support the Microsoft .NET Framework.

Today we are announcing a major milestone by releasing the Beta version of the open source Google APIs Client Library for .NET. This includes service-specific libraries and samples for Google APIs, built on our new client library generation infrastructure. We’re now comfortable enough with the stability and features of the library that we want you to start building real production applications. Currently we support Microsoft .NET 3.5 and 4.0 and Mono 2.6.7 (and higher). In the future we hope to also support Windows Phone 7 and Microsoft Silverlight.

To demonstrate how easy to use the library can be, here is a snippet from the goo.gl sample to shorten a URL using the goo.gl service:

// Create an instance of the UrlShortener-service. var service = new UrlshortenerService();

// Make a "Shorten URL" request. string urlToShorten = "http://maps.google.com/";

Url response = service.Url.Insert(new Url { LongUrl = urlToShorten }).Fetch();

// Print the shortened url. string shortUrl = response.Id; Console.WriteLine(urlToShorten + " -> " + shortUrl);

New versions of Google Analytics Management API

Google are releasing two new versions of the Google Analytics Management API into public beta: a brand new version 3.0 and a backwards compatible version 2.4. Both new versions migrate the Management API from the existing Google Data Protocol to Google’s new discovery-based API infrastructure. This impacts the way you request and handle data from the API.

All future development of the API will be done to version 3.0, so we also added some interesting new data, including:

  • Event goals are fully represented.
  • An internal web property id that can be used to deep-link into the Google Analytics user interface.
  • Profile configurations for the default page and site search query parameters.

With this change, we are also announcing the deprecation of the legacy version 2.3 of the Management API. It will continue to work for 2 months, after which all v2.3 requests will return a v2.4 response.

The biggest changes in switching to the new versions are that you now need to register your applications via the Google APIs Console and use a developer token. Also, the URL endpoints have changed, which influence how you request OAuth authorization tokens.

For complete details on what’s new, see today’s post on the Google Analytics Blog. If you have any questions or concerns, please join the conversation in our Management API developer group.