G Suite Developers Blog

Making Google Calendar Applications Faster: Partial Response and Update

March 25, 2010

Google Calendar Data APIGET http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/example@google.com/private/full?fields=entry(title,gd:when)<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:gd="http://schemas.google.com/g/2005">
<entry>
<title type="text">Example meeting</title>
<gd:when endTime="2010-03-25T09:00:00.000-07:00" startTime="2010-03-25T08:00:00.000-07:00">
<gd:reminder method="alert" minutes="10"/>
<gd:reminder method="sms" minutes="10"/>
</gd:when>
</entry>
... more entries ...
</feed>PATCHPATCHgd:fieldPATCH http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/default/private/full/eventID HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/xml
Host: www.google.com
GData-Version: 2
If-Match "FE8LQQJJeSp7IWA6WhVa"

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<entry>
<title type="text">Example meeting update</title>
<gd:when endTime="2010-03-27T10:00:00.000-07:00" startTime="2010-03-27T09:00:00.000-07:00">
<gd:reminder method="alert" minutes="10"/>
<gd:reminder method="sms" minutes="10"/>
</gd:when>
</entry>Developer’s Guidepost on the Google Code BlogPosted by Peng Ying, Google Calendar API Team

How Atlassian integrated with Google Apps - Part 1

March 24, 2010

Editor's note: This post was written by Richard Wallace of Atlassian. This is part one of a two-part series on Atlassian's recent development for the Google Apps Marketplace. Atlassian's JIRA Studio is a hosted software development suite, combining Subversion source control, issue tracking, wiki collaboration, code reviews and continuous integration. JIRA Studio is now integrated with Google Apps and is featured in the Google Apps Marketplace - a great tool for development teams using Google Apps. This series explores some of what Atlassian worked on, and what they learned along the way.Part 1: Nine cool things you can do with the JIRA Studio Activity BarGoogle Apps MarketplaceJIRA Studio integrationGoogle Appshosted SaaS offeringsJIRA Studiorich set of APIs

all the recent activity going on in Studio - who's working on what issue, who committed what and how long ago
issues assigned to you

what reviews you need to do

recent builds

favorite wiki pages

unread mail in your Gmail inbox

recent Google Docs

any upcoming events on your Google Calendar

and chat with anyone with a Google Talk or Jabber account

Initial planning

Comet techniquesHow do we scale?Servlet 3.0Virtual MachinesHow will it be deployed?

JettyGrizzlyAbstract, abstract, abstractAtmosphereJerseyEarly daysHTTP streaminglong polling

same origin policyOAuthBy Richard Wallace, AtlassianNow it's just a matter of rolling it out, right? Not quite. Part 2 of this series talks through a few other hurdles we had to jump over (or crash through) to get ready for launch.

Google Sites API v1.2: Page Templates and Web Address Mappings

March 23, 2010

Google Sites APIWeb address mappingsWeb address mappingssite feedwith-mappings=truehttp://www.mydomainsite.comhttp://sites.google.com/a/domain.com/mysitehelp center articlePage templateswe launchedpage templatesFileCabinetPageEntry templateInstanceEntry = new FileCabinetPageEntry();
templateInstanceEntry.setTitle(
new PlainTextConstruct("File cabinet template instance"));
templateInstanceEntry.addLink(new Link(SitesLink.Rel.TEMPLATE,
Link.Type.ATOM,
existingTemplateEntry.getSelfLink().getHref()));

String feedUrl = "https://sites.google.com/feeds/content/site/siteName";
FileCabinetPageEntry fileCabFromTemplate = client.insert(
new URL(feedUrl), templateInstanceEntry);documentationJava guidechangelogBug fixes in this release: 1903, 1762Posted by Eric Bidelman , Google Sites API Team

Resumable Upload for the Google Data APIs

March 22, 2010

backing up local filesDocuments List APIGoogle Data APIsResumableHttpRequestsProposalPOST /feeds/upload/create-session/default/private/full?convert=false HTTP/1.1
Host: docs.google.com
GData-Version: 3.0
Authorization: <your authorization header here>
Content-Length: 292
Content-Type: application/atom+xml
X-Upload-Content-Type: application/msword
X-Upload-Content-Length: 7654321

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<entry xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
xmlns:docs="http://schemas.google.com/docs/2007">
<category scheme="http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#kind"
term="http://schemas.google.com/docs/2007#document"/>
<title>MyTitle</title>
<docs:writersCanInvite value="false"/>
</entry>Content-RangePUT <unique_upload_uri> HTTP/1.1
Host: docs.google.com
Content-Length: 100000
Content-Type: application/pdf
Content-Range: bytes 0-99999/1234567

<bytes 0-99999>documentationclient library samplesPosted by Eric Bidelman, Google Apps API Team

Enabling Single Sign on with OpenID for the Google Apps Marketplace

March 16, 2010

Users of cloud-based business applications shouldn’t have to create, remember and maintain new credentials for each of the many apps that they use. With applications on the Google Apps Marketplace, they don’t need to-- these applications allow users to login with their existing Google Apps accounts using OpenID.OpenID

To enable the Single Sign On experience for Marketplace apps, developers simply need to add a universal navigation link and an OpenID realm to their application manifest. Adding these elements is easy-- it’s just a snippet of XML:

<Extension id="navLink" type="link">
  <Name>Amazing Cloud App</Name>      
  <Url>http://www.example.com/home.php?domain=${DOMAIN_NAME}</Url>
</Extension>

<Extension id="realm" type="openIdRealm">
  <Url>http://www.example.com</Url>
</Extension>

With this XML in the application manifest, a link called “Amazing Cloud App” will appear in the universal navigation of all Google Apps. Also, if one of the realms specified in the manifest file precisely matches the openid.realm in the OpenID request, then the user will be seamlessly signed into the app after clicking on the link in the universal navigation (without seeing a typical OpenID interstitial allow/deny page).

Of course, you’ll also need code in your application which accepts OpenID logins. In addition to open source libraries, here are a few companies that are making it easier for cloud applications to integrate with the Google Apps Marketplace. Their code provides simple APIs with which developers can integrate, leaving some of the complexities of the OpenID protocol to be implemented by the experts -- no need to hand-roll your own OpenID code.

JanRain
JanRain’s open source PHP and Ruby OpenID libraries and on-demand RPX solution enabled the implemention of OpenID for many of the companies that launched on the Google Apps Marketplace by writing simple code or web service calls.
Ping Identity
Ping’s PingFederate is an on-premise service that allows SaaS applications to easily accept OpenID and SAML-based logins by integrating with their libraries or using their web server or application server plug-ins.
TriCipher
TriCipher’s myOneLogin Identity Services is an on-demand application that allows developers to accept OpenID, SAML and other federation protocols by writing simple web service calls.

Their are plenty of open source OpenID libraries available for other platforms, such as OpenID4Java (using Step2 code for Google Apps) and DotNetOpenAuth. More information on implementing Single Sign On in Google Apps Marketplace apps can be found on code.google.com.

If you need additional information on building apps for the Google Apps Marketplace, see the Developer’s Overivew on code.google.com.

Posted by Ryan Boyd, Google Apps Marketplace Team

Google Apps security and high availability support EZasset success

March 15, 2010

Editor's Note: This post was written by Paul Marsolan from StrongTech, an asset management company, and makers of EZasset. We invited StrongTech to share their experiences building an application on top of Google Apps utilizing some of our APIs.

StrongTech Asset Management is a leading asset manager for federal agencies, institutions, enterprises and financial intermediaries, worldwide. StrongTech provides strategies and services that span the full spectrum of asset classes including: IT assets, wireless assets, weapons, healthcare assets, real estate, infrastructure, and energy.

In 2009, StrongTech, makers of EZasset, made the decision to port our application from Amazon EC2 to Google App Engine for two reasons: security and server management. While Amazon EC2 is an excellent platform, due to our government contracts and growing business clients we needed the most secure platform possible. The Amazon EC2 is a raw nuts and bolts server system. The EC2 offers developers the same environment as if there were servers in a server room at the office. EZasset decided that we did not want to worry about backups, server patches, firewall settings, load balancing, scalability, or other issues. We wanted to focus on programing and offer a great product for a great price. We made the decision to let Google focus on the server and security management for us.

What attracted us to the Google Apps Marketplace from the technical standpoint was the security offered through the Marketplace, and the scalability. We don’t need to worry if we have a thousand new clients sign up in one day: Google Apps Marketplace can handle our success. From the business side, getting EZasset in front of customers on the Google Apps Marketplace, and credibility of Google itself, are immeasurable. Millions of people use Google to find solutions for problems; it would have been foolish of us to not be a part of the Marketplace.

Google services enhance our already feature rich applications. Integrating Google Calendar, Google Documents, and others, has allowed our software to be more powerful without sacrificing user friendliness. We use Google Calendar for maintenance tracking and notifications, Google Talk for real time communication, Google Docs for easy document uploads, and Google Spreadsheet for importing and exporting data into and out of EZasset.com. We’re even able to offer a robust support forum for our customers by using Google Sites.

The security, ease of integration and scalability of Google Apps and the high availability of Google App Engine made porting an easy choice. EZasset has grown with Google, and now with Google's application marketplace, we can grow our business even more.

To put it simply: We are able to focus on what we do best, providing an easy to use asset management system, while Google does what they do best; providing secure, high availability servers.

Like any platform, there are positives and negatives. But the flexibility and power of the system, allows for creative solutions. Since there is no “computer” that the code actually sits on, development of applications is done differently than on classic web servers (EC2, your own servers). With our former deployment on EC2, uploaded photos could be stored on a web server hard drive. Google App Engine doesn’t have a hard drive to access per se, but we were able to use Google Datastore, and store the photo as a data “blob”. Other platforms might not have allowed such a creative solution.

Google Data Store is easy to work with. Below are code snippets that show how we upload and store pictures in the Google Data Store.

Upload image on Google App Engine code:

1.1 Create Data Bean Class, for example Photo

import javax.persistence.Entity;
import javax.persistence.Enumerated;
import javax.persistence.GeneratedValue;
import javax.persistence.GenerationType;
import javax.persistence.Id;

import com.google.appengine.api.datastore.Blob;

@Entity
    public class Photo implements Serializable {

    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
    private Long key;

    @Enumerated
    private Blob imageData;

    ......
   }


1.2. In code, create instance for class Photo and fill it.

    ...
    InputStream stream = ..
    Photo photo = new Photo();
    photo.setImageData( new Blob(IOUtils.toByteArray(stream)));
    ...

1.3 Save instance

    EntityManager em = null;
        try{
            em = EMF.getEM();
            em.getTransaction().begin();
            em.persist(photo);
            em.getTransaction().commit();
        }catch(Throwable t){
            t.printStackTrace();
            if(em != null){
                em.getTransaction().rollback();
            }
        }
        finally{
            if(em.isOpen() || em != null ){
                em.close();
            }
        }

TIP: Google App Engine offers high availability by loading applications across many different “servers” in the platform. This allows your application to be instantly accessible when it is in frequent use. When an application is not getting consistent traffic, Google App Engine will “spin down” the application after some inactivity. This can cause a slower initial load of the large complex applications. Compare it to revisiting a website with no “cookies” saved. After the initial load the application will run quickly once more.

Getting Started Is Easy - Google App Engine is a platform, and it is different than programming on a server. There is a learning curve associated with development on GAE. Once our developers had a week or so to play around with the GAE, they found it is was very easy to program on it. Google supplies a Google Group that has a wealth of information from developers, with Googlers answering questions. We were able to make the port of EZasset in a shorter time then we expected. We also get all the great benefits of high availability, better server management, and security.

Our asset management software is innovative, high quality, powerful and feature rich. We needed a platform that would allow us to continue to provide the high level of quality our customers expect. Google App Engine has allowed us to do that, and do it in the most secure, available platform.

See EZasset in action at the Google I/O Conference in the Developer Sandbox.

Integrating with Google Apps using Gmail contextual gadgets

March 12, 2010

Campfire OneGoogle Apps MarketplaceGoogle Data APIsvideos, photos, and moreAppirioPS Connect

fill out this formGoogle I/Oour sessionPosted by Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead, Google Enterprise team