Check out Google’s latest cloud technologies at Cloudstock!

There’s an exciting new event happening December 6th dubbed the “Woodstock for Cloud Developers.” We’ll be participating at Cloudstock, an industry event taking place in San Francisco’s Moscone West, that brings together a growing developer community and some of the leading cloud technology companies (such as Google, vmware, Salesforce.com and Amazon) to learn, hack and network.

Google is a strong believer in the open technologies powering the web, such as HTML5. Cloud computing is about powering innovations on the web with platforms and services that make developers like you more efficient and allow you to concentrate on solving business problems. No longer do you have to worry about the hassle of acquiring and managing servers, disks, RAM and CPU– it’s all accessible in the cloud.

Google will be presenting the following sessions at Cloudstock:

  • Introduction to Google’s Cloud Platform Technologies (Christian Schalk)
    This talk will provide an in depth review of Google’s Cloud Platform Technologies by first reviewing both Google App Engine and App Engine for Business followed by an introduction to Google’s new cloud technologies: Google Storage, Google Prediction API and BigQuery. Throughout the presentation, in depth technical demonstrations will be given showing how to use these technologies together in an integrated manner.
  • Selling your Cloud App on the Google Apps Marketplace (Ryan Boyd)
    This demo-focused session will review how to integrate your app with Google Apps and sell it on the Google Apps Marketplace to reach 30 million users at 3 million businesses. It will dive into the SaaSy Voice demo application, showing how technologies like OpenID-enabled Single Sign-On, OAuth and AtomPub make it easy to create great user experiences for your customers.

We have another session which will be announced shortly– stay tuned to this blog and the GoogleCode twitter account!

Register for the free Cloudstock event at:
http://www.cloudstockevent.com/

Moscone West
San Francisco, CA
Monday, December 6th, 2010

Looking forward to meeting you there!

By Ryan Boyd, Google Developer Team

Google I/O 2009 – ..Life of an App Engine Request

Google I/O 2009 – From Spark Plug to Drive Train: Life of an App Engine Request Alon Levi App Engine’s serving architecture allows for real-time autoscaling without using virtualization.

http://www.youtube.com/v/oAMMBP_SacA?f=videos&app=youtube_gdata

Map your data with the Maps API and Fusion Tables

If you have ever tried to plot a very large number of overlays on an API map you have probably reached a point at which the performance of your application begins to suffer. With one hundred or so markers, most browsers cope just fine, and clustering solutions like Fluster can help support more. But if you have thousands of overlays that you wish to show, rendering them individually can be problematic.

The Maps API v3 now offers two solutions to this problem. If you have a large volume of geospatial data that can be served as KML, the KmlLayer class can render up to 50,000 features as an overlay that does not impact performance on any browser. To support data sets that are structured as tables, such as a database or spreadsheet, we have also now added the FusionTablesLayer class for rendering data stored in Google Fusion Tables.

Google Fusion Tables is a fascinating new experimental Google Research project offering storage, search, and management of large structured data sets in the cloud. Up to 100MB of data can be stored per table, and each row in a table can have an associated location, line, or polygon feature. Using the FusionTablesLayer class you can render features on an API map as a clickable overlay. When a feature is clicked, the application can access a copy of the complete row of data associated with the feature.

Fusion Tables also supports an SQL like query language, which you can use to filter the features shown on a map. The below map visualises mountain biking trails uploaded to Fusion Tables by mtbguru.com. The slider allows you to filter trails by their length, and the trails shown on the map are updated accordingly. If you click on a trail a custom dialog is shown which indicates the elevation profile for the trail concerned.

The FusionTablesLayer also supports rendering data sets as a heatmap. The below map of beaches in Brazil illustrates the benefit of this. When rendered as point features it is difficult to tell the relative density of the beaches without zooming in further. However once you switch to displaying the data as a heatmap the high density of beaches west of Rio de Janeiro becomes immediately clear.

The combination of Fusion Tables with the Maps API makes it easy to host large sets of data in the cloud, and visualise them in your Maps API application. It is quick and simple to get up and running with Fusion Tables, and the addition of the FusionTableLayer class to Maps API v3 enables Maps applications to be tightly coupled with data hosted in Fusion Tables. Give it a try, and let us know what you think of this experiment in the Groups!

Posted by Thor Mitchell, Maps API Product Manager