Launched: Google Health PHP Client Library

Posted by Eric Bidelman, Google Data APIs Team

Here's good news for all you PHP developers working with the Health Data API!

The Google Data PHP Client Library now includes support for the Google Health Data API. You can download the latest copy from the googlehealthsamples project page.

In addition to the download, we also have a few developer resources to get you started:
Getting Started with the PHP Client Library
PHP Developer's Guide
Sample Application

[NFGB] Link - from Official Google Data APIs Blog Related From Google Blogs: Your blog, your data The gift of gadgets Google Chrome (BETA) Fast PDF viewing right in your browser

Google Base API Now in the JavaScript Client Library

Posted by Eric Bidelman, Google Data APIs Team

Today, we launched a new version of the JavaScript client library that includes the Google Base Data API.

The Base API is great for creating interesting JS mashups. With this new release, it's much easier to build gadgets, mashups and JS applications that reuse the content in Base. In addition, you can interact with your personal items feed to create, modify and delete existing items.

To get you started, we've published a new Interactive JavaScript Developer's Guide and created two samples that demonstrate the library's capabilities:

Base Items Mapper

A read-write mashup that lets users update their geocoded Base items using the Google Maps API.

Jobs Finder from Google Base

An iGoogle gadget that returns a list of nearby jobs. The listings are catered to the user's search preferences.

[NFGB] Link - from Official Google Data APIs Blog Related From Google Blogs: OpenSocial's birthday wrap-up: it's good to be one Really new in Labs this time: SMS Text Messaging for chat Get your Gmail stickers Safety, education, and empowerment on YouTube

No, You Lock It Up!

Posted by Eric Bidelman & Kunal Shah, Google Data APIs Team

The latest realease of the Google Data Python client library (v1.2.3) includes the usual updates and bug fixes, but also adds two important features, OAuth and secure AuthSub. Both authorization mechanisms allow developers to make their web applications more secure by requiring API requests be digitally signed. Check out the sample applications to get started:

Secure AuthSub example using the Google Health Data API
http://code.google.com/p/gdata-python-client/source/browse/trunk/samples/authsub/secure_authsub.py


OAuth example using the Google Documents List Data API
http://code.google.com/p/gdata-python-client/source/browse/trunk/samples/oauth/oauth_example.py

You can download the latest client from the client's project page. As always, if you're interested in contributing, the door is always open. Drop by the contributors discussion group and jump right in.

[NFGB] Link - from Official Google Data APIs Blog Related From Google Blogs: 20 days, 9 hours... Spreading holiday cheer...Google Docs style Working towards "One Africa, One Health" Digital Marketing in the Downturn

Like a Version; AtomPub Compliant for the Very First Time

Posted by Brandon Bilinski, Google Data APIs Team

Since the Atom Publishing Protocol specification was finalized, we have been working on making the Google Data APIs compliant with the AtomPub standard. As of today, we are releasing a new version of most of our services that achieves full compliancy with RFC 5032.

If you're worried this this may break your current application, rest easy. This change will only be available in API version 2 and higher. If you are happy with the current version, you can keep doing what you've been doing and the API will continue to work as it always has. If instead you'd like to use the AtomPub compliant version (and the new v2 features), just specify API version 2 in an HTTP header, and you're good to go.

One of the new v2 features is the use of HTTP ETags for optimistic concurrency. ETags are a web standard that work well with HTTP caching. The client libraries that support version 2 will handle ETags automatically, but if you are interested in how ETags look at the protocol level, check out the details in the Google Data Protocol Documentation. Some services are using V2 to introduce additional improvements as well (for example, YouTube's new geo-search feature), so be sure to check out the documentation for your favorite service to see what's new.

For those of you who'd like to try out version 2 in our client libraries, the Java and .NET client libraries have been updated with V2 support. To see a list of the services who are V2 compliant and to find out how to migrate your apps to the new version, check out our migration guide. We recommend migrating to v2 if you can, as any future improvements will be introduced to version 2 and higher. For further information about the release, please check out the new Google Data documentation or head over to our discussion group.

[NFGB] Link - from Official Google Data APIs Blog Related From Google Blogs: Spice up your inbox with colors and themes Flu Knew? Food Court Musical - the beauty of YouTube YouTube - CPG Brands continuing innovation.

Federated Login For Google Account Users

Posted by Yariv Adan, Google Security Team

Many of the developers who use the Google Data APIs have asked for a way to remove the need for a login system on their site. Today we announced that we are allowing websites to join a limited test of an API that will allow single sign-on for Google Account users who visit your websites. The initial version of the API will enable websites to validate the identity of a Google Account user including the optional ability to request the user's e-mail address. Here's are screenshots of the example flow that a user might see if he or she starts at a website that uses this new feature.

The user would open the homepage of a website that uses the Google Data APIs (KidMallPics, in this example), and instead of having to fill out a login box or account creation form, he or she would simply click the Google button.


The user would then be taken to the Google website, where they would confirm they want to sign in to KidMallPics.


Finally, the user would be sent back to the KidMallPics site, where he or she would be signed in. If the user had previously signed into KidMallPics and authorized them to access the user's photo account at Google, then the user could now perform actions on the KidMallPics website such as having his or her mall photos transferred to Google using the Google Data protocol.


This new API is already being used by http://www.buxfer.com/ and http://www.plaxo.com/. Shashank Pandit at Buxfer says that "We now offer all our users the ability to login to Buxfer using their Google Account to avoid the need to create yet another login and password." Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo says, "It's great to see Google become an Open ID provider in addition to supporting OAuth, which we already use. We are thrilled to be among the first sites to allow users to login with their Google Accounts. This is going to be great for users, Plaxo and the web."

We chose OpenID as the protocol for our identity provider because it makes a large set of open source implementations available for many different development platforms used by Google Data API developers. To learn more about this new API see http://code.google.com/apis/accounts/docs/OpenID.html. To request access to the limited trial, please visit our Google Federated Login discussion group and register using the online registration form.

Google is also working with the open source community on ways to combine the OAuth and OpenID protocol so a website can not only request the user's identity and e-mail address, but can at the same time request access to information available via OAuth-enabled APIs such as Google Data APIs as well as standard data formats such as Portable Contacts and OpenSocial REST APIs. In the future, this should allow a website to immediately provide a much more streamlined, personalized and socially relevant experience for users when they log in to trusted websites.

Link - from Official Google Data APIs Blog
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Writing OpenSocial code just got easier: introducing the OpenSocial Dev App

Today, I'm happy to announce the OpenSocial Dev App: a tool that lets you prototype and debug JavaScript code against a live container environment. Its aim is to ease the learning curve of those unfamiliar with the OpenSocial JavaScript APIs, as well as give experienced developers a quick way to test new containers and API methods without the hurdle of writing full XML specs, uploading files to a server, or having to install a bunch of simple test applications.

As an OpenSocial developer, I've written a lot of little gadgets to test out new containers and API functions. Previously, this meant filling out a gadget XML spec, writing a bit of JavaScript, uploading the file to my server, installing the gadget on the container, and loading the app. I noticed I'd often forget to fill out a required field in the spec, make a typo, or confuse newFetchPersonRequest with newFetchPeopleRequest (for the hundredth time!), which made the process of writing simple test code more frustrating.

Using the Dev App, a user can write a couple of test functions and execute them directly in the editing window provided. Want to use the code again in the future? Samples can be saved and loaded for later use.


Here's a list of the features we've included in the Dev App:

Code tab - Test JavaScript code on the current container. You can save and load code samples, which is great for writing small tests or examples. Click the name of a loaded sample to open it in a new browser window- the URL of this window can be bookmarked, sent to friends, or used in bug reports.

Samples tab - A list of samples that illustrate common OpenSocial operations (we expect to continuously add more samples). You can load these samples directly into the code tab to test their functionality on your current container. Once loaded, try changing the sample to add new functionality!

Data Viewer tab - Inspect the data that the container returns when requesting people and persistent data. Want to see whether a container supports fetching people by ID? Want to see which fields the container has implemented and given your application access to? Use this valuable tool to explore data quickly, and without needing to write a single line of code.

Export XML tab - Writing an XML spec is now as easy as filling out a simple form. If you want to use the same data with different code samples, your input can be saved and loaded.

News tab - Collects the latest entries from various OpenSocial developer blogs and presents them in one place. Stay up to date on what's going on in various OpenSocial containers without needing to keep up with many different blogs.

Help tab - Just in case you want some more help with a feature, the OpenSocial Dev App features an online help browser, complete with a comprehensive "getting started" guide.

For more information, links, and a copy of the online help guide, visit the OpenSocial Dev App homepage. If you want to test out the OpenSocial Dev App in a live container, it is currently available to install from the directories on the following sites:

• Friendster
• hi5
• orkut
• MySpace
• Ning

If your favorite container isn't listed above, don't worry -- you can still use the OpenSocial Dev App by using either of following XML links:

• OpenSocial Dev App for API version 0.7
• OpenSocial Dev App for API version 0.8

Happy coding!

Posted by Arne Roomann-Kurrik, Google Developer Programs

Link - from OpenSocial API Blog
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An Introduction to REST

Posted by Joe Gregorio, Google Data APIs Team

Google Data APIs are based on the Atom Publishing Protocol and both Google Data APIs and AtomPub get many advantages from being RESTful protocols. Often the meaning of REST and the advantages of RESTfulness go unexplained so I put together this short 15 minute video that explains REST and some of the advantages you get with a protocol built in that style.


click through to YouTube.com and select the "watch in high quality" option

Link - from Official Google Data APIs Blog
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Update, Share, File: Documents List API launches new features!

Posted by Jochen Hartmann, Google Data APIs Team

I am very happy to announce that three major features requests have been implemented in the Documents List Data API this week. These are:

• Update document content: You can now issue PUT requests to your documents and modify contents, metadata or both. (Issue 277)
  
• Share by programmatically controlling ownership: There is now an ACL feed for each document that you can modify by adding or removing entries. (Issue 311)
  
• File your documents: You can now create new folders in the API, move documents in and out of folders and have full access to nested folders. (Issue 377, Issue 383)
  

Please check out the updated documentation and look for these features being implemented in our client libraries soon.

Link - from Official Google Data APIs Blog
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Use the Google Data JavaScript client library with Chrome and Safari

Posted by Austin Chau, Google Data APIs Team

The Google Data JavaScript client library has expanded its support to cover our latest browser Chrome as well as Safari 3.x.

Now you can start writing AJAX applications that use the Google Data JavaScript client library and have your apps be compatible with the following desktop browser environments:

• Internet Explorer 6 & 7
• Firefox 2.x & 3.x
• Safari 3.x
• Chrome

The Google Data JavaScript client library is a pure JavaScript library that allows you perform cross-domain AJAX read/write operations for several Google services - Google Calendar, Blogger, Google Contacts, and Google Finance.

Check out some of the creative applications that were written using the Google Data JavaScript client library--

Calendar Visualization using Google Calendar Data API:


Contacts Picker using Google Contacts Data API:


blog.gears using Blogger Data API and the Gears API:


Ready to get started building your own app? Click on the links to the individual services above to use the interactive developer's guides and drop by in the forums if you have any questions and want to chat with other developers.

Link - from Google Data APIs Blog
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Just Feeding While You Work

Posted by Frank Mantek, Google Data APIs Team

Did you ever want to just kick off the download of some videos, upload a few new ones and then go on editing the description of that new title you are working on while the heavy lifting is done in the background of your application?

Now you have a friend in the multithreaded business. With the latest release of the .NET SDK for the Google Data APIs, you can easily spawn background queries, updates and even batch operations without blocking your UI anymore. This is done by using the event-based asynchronous pattern that is also used in other .NET components, so you will feel right at home using this new feature set.

Here you can see the updated PhotoTool backing up two Picasa Albums while editing the metadata of another picture:

In addition, the release sports a number of other enhancements and bug fixes documented in the release notes.

Link - from Google Data APIs Blog
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Healthier Documentation

Posted by Eric Bidelman, Google Data APIs Team

If you've thought about diving into the Google Health Data API, there's no better time to start. Today the documentation got a major face-lift. There's a slew of new content and several new pages:

Getting Started Guide
Developer Best Practices
Libraries & Code

There's also new information for third-party services and data providers.

If you've already implemented the API, we'd love to hear about it. Take our survey and let us know how it went.

Link - from Google Data APIs Blog
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What's That? Google Data Gadgets?

Posted by Eric Bidelman, Google Data APIs Team

Google just announced a new version of iGoogle that includes a special feature for gadget authentication called the OAuth Proxy. With the OAuth Proxy, developers can finally create secure Google Data gadgets.

Even Google teams are using this new feature to build gadgets such as the Google Book Search gadget which was announced today and is based on the new Google Book Search API.

The OAuth Proxy is built on top of OAuth and an open-source project called Shindig, an implementation of the gadget specification and OpenSocial. Using this platform, any OpenSocial gadget container can add support for OAuth-enabled gadgets. For Google Data developers, this means that a gadget you build for iGoogle will be able to run on other OpenSocial containers as well. Of course, you are not limited to using the Google Data APIs. The iGoogle OAuth Proxy works with any site that offers OAuth-enabled APIs, such as MySpace.

Interested in building a gadget? I've written an article that explains how to use the Javascript client library to create a Blogger gadget. If you're interested in diving straight in, detailed information can be found in the gadgets documentation.



There's never been a better time to mash up your Google Data!

Link - from Google Data APIs Blog

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API Access to Gmail Settings with Google Apps

Posted by Andrew Olsen, Google Apps Team

New admin tool dawns
Settings change like the seasons
For hosted email

When small businesses use Google Apps, it's easy for administrators to help employees configure user settings account-by-account, but this approach doesn't scale up very well for larger companies.

Now that we have a growing list of customers with hundreds and even thousands of employees apiece, offering a streamlined way for admins to configure account settings is essential. With the release of the Google Email Settings API, Premier and Education Edition administrators can programmatically update Gmail settings for their users in bulk by making requests to a GData feed. Modifiable settings include labels, filters, signatures, vacation responders, "send mail as" aliases, interface language, email forwarding, POP, IMAP, and more.

For example, suppose you, an administrator, want to allow a certain set of users at your domain to send an email using the alias support@yourdomain.com, you could do the following:

First you would create a working nickname or group support@yourdomain.com, which could forward e-mails to your support team or to an issue tracking system.
Then you use the API to allow the team to send e-mail as this address. Each time a user joined the support team, you would simply make this POST request to the appropriate URL - like the following request when user liz@yourdomain.com joins the team.

POST https://apps-apis.google.com/a/feeds/emailsettings/2.0/yourdomain.com/liz/sendas


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<atom:entry xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:apps="http://schemas.google.com/apps/2006">

    <apps:property name="name" value="yourdomain.com Support Team" />
    <apps:property name="address" value="support@yourdomain.com" />

</atom:entry>

For all the details, check out the Google Email Settings API documentation.

Link - from Google Data APIs Blog

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PHP Documentation Just Got Better!

Posted by Jochen Hartmann, Google Data APIs Team

Just a quick note about a massive update to our Getting Started with the Google Data PHP Client Library article. Not only do we now have a new video in which Trevor Johns walks you through installing and using the client library, but we have also added some tips on how to use the new installation checker script which can help detect common installation issues.



While we are on the subject of getting started, you may also want to check out the new videos for the Python client library and for the .NET client library.

Link - from Google Data APIs Blog

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Follow us on Twitter

Posted by Stephanie Liu, Google Data APIs Team

If you just can't get enough of us here, we've also been broadcasting out into the Twittersphere with our googledata account. If you're not in the know, Twitter is a microblogging service that makes it easy to keep up with your favorite people (hopefully us) on multiple networks and devices. Consider it Google Data "breaking news." :) Feel free to @ us with shoutouts and questions!

Link - from Google Data APIs Blog
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Saving Bandwidth Made Easy: Google Data JavaScript Packaging

Posted by Trevor Johns, Google Data APIs Team

At Google, we believe it's important to conserve limited resources, whether it's the environment or bandwidth. While it won't help with global warming (we have other projects for that), our new support for packages in our Google Data JavaScript client library can help with the bandwidth.

This feature allows you to specify precisely which Google Data services you'll be using in your applications. We then use this information to send just the library code you need, leaving out all the rest. Less code sent across the wire means faster page loads for your applications. Faster page loads mean happier users.

For comparison, the current version of the JavaScript client library is 47 KB in size. If you request only the Blogger package, that library shrinks to 37 KB, a 21% reduction.

To take advantage of this, just add a packages argument when you're loading the client library. For example, the following statement would request only the code necessary for working with the Blogger and Contacts APIs:

google.load("gdata", "1.x", { packages : ["blogger", "contacts"] });

If you don't specify a packages argument, you'll receive all available packages, just as before. This means that your old code will continue to work just as it is.

If you have any questions, feel free to drop by our discussion groups where you'll find other developers ready to lend a helping hand.

Link - from Google Data APIs Blog
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Holy Moving Pictures, Batman! - SendMeRSS

Posted by Jeff Fisher, Google Data APIs Team

In case you missed the news over at the Google Code Blog, you can now upload videos to Picasa Web Albums using its Data API. It's as easy as uploading a photo -- a POST to the album URL with a video format (video/quicktime, for example) specified as the Content-Type. You can also choose a custom thumbnail for the video. The Java client library is currently the only library with support, but the snippet to upload a video and set the thumbnail looks like this:

MediaFileSource myMedia = new MediaFileSource(
    new File("/home/liz/birthday.mov"), "video/quicktime");
PhotoEntry returnedVideo = myService.insert(feedUrl, PhotoEntry.class, myMedia);

MediaFileSource myThumb = new MediaFileSource(
    new File("/home/liz/birthday_title.jpg"), "image/jpeg");
returnedVideo.setMediaSource(myThumb);
PhotoEntry updatedEntry = returnedVideo.updateMedia(false);

Read up more in the docs.

Link - from Google Data APIs Blog

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It's... A LIVE Samples Demo Site

Posted by Jeff Fisher, Google Data APIs Team

Sometimes it's not enough that we give you the source code. Sometimes it takes a while for you to configure a local Apache server and try things out. Sometimes you just want to be wowed without having to do anything! Now you can see what our samples look like before you download our client libraries by visiting the following URL: http://www.googlecodesamples.com/

Link - from Google Data APIs Blog

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Congratulations to Paul Alan Freshney!

A new gadget by Paul Alan Freshney is featured on the Inside Google Desktop blog. See the post Featured gadget: Periodic Table.

Posted by Kathy Walrath, Technical Writer (Google Desktop Team)

Link - from Google Desktop APIs Blog

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A New Google Data API for Book Search

Posted by Guillaume Poncin, Google Book Search Team

To complement today's launch of the Embedded Viewer API, we are happy to announce a new Google Data API for Google Book Search.

The Book Search Data API lets your application perform full-text searches across our complete Book Search index. In addition to basic information about each book, you can use the results to link to book previews, show to cover thumbnails, and more.

And since a large part of joy of reading or looking for books lies in the sharing of that experience with others, we are also providing access to the social features of Google Book Search. The API lets your application retrieve and submit user ratings and reviews, and build personal My Library collections for your users. And because a picture is worth a thousand words, here is a quick snapshot of the features that the API supports, from search to rating a book:



Finally, to make the Data API easy to integrate into your application, we are launching a Java client library complete with code samples and documentation. We hope the Data API, together with the Embedded Viewer, will lead to many exciting, engaging, and educational applications built atop this rich corpus of books.

For more details on today's announcement, as well as a peek at who's already started to use these APIs, check out our post on the Book Search Blog.

Link - from Google Data APIs Blog
Related: Point, Click, Understand OAuth Use the Google Data JavaScript client library with Chrome and Safari