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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!

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Open Street Map Potlatch 2 Public Alpha

Major changes in the interface for editing Open Street Map online.

“You know it. You love it. It’s the editor on the main OSM web site. It’s Potlatch and it’s had some serious renovations. It’s so new that now it has a new name, “Potlatch 2″. But before Potlatch 2 can go live on the OpenStreetMap web site, it has to be put through it’s paces. After more than a year of development, Potlatch 2 is a complete re-write of Potlatch. It has new features too numerous to mention, but for the most important feature; it is an editor for OpenStreetMap. So let’s test it. “

Editing is made easier with the legend based editor. Now based in Flash [Potlatch 2 is written in ActionScript 3 using the Flex framework] and more stable than its predecessor.
Backgrounds are easier to control (OS Streeview OpenData shown above)

Point of Interest editing (Image source: OSM Wiki)

Try it you might like it.
If you want to test this new editor that is now in public alpha you can at
http://geowiki.com/

Hopefully this will be implemented in the Open Street Map main site soon.

Techies might be interested to know that this can deployed on your own website.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Potlatch_2/Deploying_Potlatch_2

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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.

アスタ・ラ・ビスタ — “Asuta ra bisuta,” from sunny “Kariforunia!”

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Xtracked July 2009 beta-update: Kickoff!

It’s been quiet… too quiet around Xtracked! But starting today that’s all going to change and we want you to be the first to know! Grab an online copy of our very first newsletter to find out more about our entire new Beta website, the Official Xtracked Blog and our latest tweets on Twitter!