The magic of gzip compression

All developers agree that saving bandwidth is a critical factor for the success of a mobile application. Less data usage means faster response times and also lower costs for the users as the vast majority of mobile data plans are limited or billed on a per-usage basis.

When using any of the Google Data APIs in your application, you can reduce the amount of data to be transferred by requesting gzip-encoded responses. On average, the size of a page of users returned by the Provisioning API (100 accounts) is about 100 Kb, while the same data, gzip-encoded, is about 5 Kb — 20 times smaller! When you can reduce data sizes at this dramatic scale, the benefits of compression will often outweigh any costs in client-side processing for decompression.

Enabling gzip-encoding in your application requires two steps. You have to edit the User-Agent

string to contain the value gzip

and you must also include an Accept-Encoding

header with the same value. For example:

User-Agent: my application - gzip

Accept-Encoding: gzip

Client libraries for the various supported programming languages make enabling gzip-encoded responses even easier. For instance, in the .NET client library it is as easy as setting the boolean UseGZip flag of the RequestFactory object:

service.RequestFactory.UseGZip = true;

For any questions, please get in touch with us in the respective forum for the API you’re using.

Visibility versus Authentication and Authorization: Service On/Off

You may have already noticed, but the controls to enable and disable individual apps in Google Apps are now all in one place on the domain Control Panel under Organization & users > Services.

Domain administrators were already able to use this tab to enable and disable the Core Google Apps suite. Now they can do the same for apps they’ve acquired from the Google Apps Marketplace. This replaces the old link labeled “Disable {app name}” in the Dashboard > {app name} > “App status” page.

App and Gadget Visibilty

This on/off switch controls app and gadget visibility. Users in suborganizations where a Marketplace App is ON will see that app in the universal navigation bar under “More”, and will see the app’s contextual gadgets in Gmail. Users where the App is OFF will not see these links or gadgets.

Your customers still configure all apps through the Dashboard tab, but now the Control Panel Services tab unifies how they enable and disable every app.

New Scoping by Suborganization

The unified controls also share an important new scoping capability: now a domain administrator can select a suborganization and control which Marketplace Apps are visible to that organizational unit, just like the Core Google Apps suite!

In the example below, the administrator has overridden the domain settings for four Marketplace Apps to make three new tools visible to just the “Engineering” suborganization and to hide one application.

Visibility versus Authentication and Authorization

As developers, you should note that for any valid Google Apps domain user who goes directly to your website, OpenID/Single Sign On will always authenticate them if their domain has OpenID enabled. This includes users who are in suborganizations where your app is OFF. That means this visibility toggle feature is not a substitute for checking that the users accessing your app have a valid license.

Similarly, the on/off switch does not affect the OAuth scopes your app has been granted when the domain admin installed your app — the admin only revokes those by explicitly revoking data access or by deleting your app. The control panel on/off switch is just a way for a domain administrator to control the visibility of apps and gadgets that would otherwise be site-wide.

Google Apps Marketplace – Developer Survey

The Google Apps Marketplace team would like to get feedback from the developer community on your experience with the Marketplace and what you think can be done to improve it.

Please fill out the survey below if you have an installable app on the Marketplace (using the Add it Now blue button), are actively building an installable app or previously had an installable app on the Marketplace.

Most questions are optional, so please provide the feedback most important to you even if you don’t have time to complete the whole survey.
 


 
We’d also like to offer the opportunity to speak 1:1 with the Google team about your Marketplace app. If you’re interested, please provide a proposed agenda at the end of the survey.

-Ryan, Scott, Steve and the entire Apps Marketplace team

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If you do not see the survey embedded above, please visit the form directly.