I’m late to talk about this one, but today is Google Developer Day. It’s wild that thousands of developers are converging in Mountain View alone, and Google is doing presentations in 10 cities around the world. The Mountain View sessions are being held in the San Jose Convention Center, and you can see the full schedule here. If you’re reading this post, you’re probably not at the event though, so you’ll want to check out the streaming webcasts.
There’s a bunch to talk about, too. There’s a new version of the Google Web Toolkit, which lets you program in Java and then convert your code to AJAX/JavaScript for free. Even more fun is Google Gears. Google Gears is a plug-in that lets online web apps store data locally, and that lets you do neat things like an offline version of Googler Reader (which I’ll be trying out when I fly up to SMX Seattle soon). 🙂
By the way, note that the Google Gears blog post is by Aaron Boodman and another Googler. That name might sound familiar. Aaron Boodman is the guy that did Greasemonkey, which (in my opinion) is one of the most wicked-cool Firefox extensions in the world. Aaron and several other Googlers are providing Google Gears under an open-source license. They’ll be collecting feedback from across the web (plus companies like Adobe) to try to make Google Gears an open standard that any web app can use.
Kudos to the folks that organized and will speak at Developer Day, the Google Reader team for putting together an offline version of Reader, and especially the Google Gears folks for making some really useful code and releasing it with an open-source license. There’s a ton of other great sessions today too, from Patrick Riley talking about Custom Search Engines to Jeff Dean talking about Google’s infrastructure (including MapReduce, the Google File System, and BigTable). Good stuff.