Silicon Valley GTUG

Dart in December

2011-12-07T19:02:00.001-08:00

The first Wednesday in December, our last meetup of the year. It was a packed house.

This month we got a look at Dart, a new web programming language, from two Google engineers. Seth Ladd is a web engineer, father, husband and is currently a Developer Advocate at Google. He produced Aloha on Rails, the Hawaii Ruby on Rails and Web Development Conference and New Game, the conference for HTML5 game developers. Way back, he wrote Expert Spring MVC book. Seth was lucky enough to help release Angry Birds for the web. He is current on the board for the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. Steve Messick works on the Dart Editor at Google.

Think of Dart as web programming with "batteries included." It's a new language, with new libraries, even its own VM, but it's based on a simple and familiar OOP model that takes almost no time to learn. It's in an early stage, open source technology preview so you can still provide feedback and affect the direction as it develops.

So why a new language? The web has some very good things going for it. Small to medium apps are easy to develop, it's platform independent with no installation required. It supports fast, incremental development, and it's everywhere, on every computer, every device. That's quite an impressive feat! What's so difficult? Writing large programs is hard. Very large program structure, libraries, the tools to see what's happening inside a running program is simply not possible. Consider two books: the very heavy volume "Javascript" and the thin, almost pamphlet-like "Javascript: The Good Parts." Any web developer can tell you, a lot of cruft has built up since the mid 90s.

Dart is a new approach to building structured web apps. It's not intended to compete with JavaScript, but to fill the vacuum evidenced by fragmented mobile platforms. Structured, high performance, high fidelity, feature-rich apps.

Dart is a simple, unsurprising OO language with typical classes, single inheritance, and interfaces -- everything you've seen before. The most unique feature is its optional typing. Developers can check types at compile time or runtime through an assertion-like method. It also has optional static typing, lexical scoping, and is single-threaded.

Wait, single threaded? Not to worry, it uses isolates similar to Erlang. Each isolate is conceptually a process and they can communicate through a mailbox system. With isolates, you can support concurrent execution with a single-threaded language. In the browser, UI elements are lightweight isolates and heavyweight isolates manifest themselves as HTML5 web workers.

There is a much-needed DOM overhaul loosely based on HTML5 DOM, but with lots of cleanup. Gone is the XML legacy. It supports type-checking and is built using Dart lists, which makes it terse.

Dart compiles to its own VM or to JavaScript. The tools can also take a snapshot of a running Dart program, serialize it, and transmit it to another VM. Obviously this could be used to cache programs for rapid startup. Receiving that heap snapshot and running it does require a Dart VM.

Seth Ladd and Steve Messick

The Dart editor is based an Eclipse RPC program. What you think about having code completion in a language bound to your web browser? It is in technology preview mode and there's lots of work to do yet. The current focus is getting the performance up to par with the far more mature traditional web technologies, but they are looking for feedback as far as what to work on next. Should they have reflection support? Rest arguments? Enum? Pattern matching? What's the best way to integrate with other browsers? You can provide your feedback at the Dart web site and discussion groups.

The Dart Web site (www.dartlang.org) contains the language spec, tutorials, and prebuilt binaries.

The Dart Project site (dart.googlecode.com) is where you can get source code, libraries, and sample apps.

You can watch the talk here

Update: Seth Ladd has provided the slides at http://www.dartlang.org/slides/2011/12/gtug/ and written a quick tour of the SDK on his blog at http://blog.sethladd.com/2012/01/dart-sdk-quick-tour.html

Honeycomb Highlights

2011-06-01T22:24:00.000-07:00

Chet Haas and Romaine Guy gave us a reprise of their I/O talk, "Honeycomb Highlights" which was a good introduction to the Honeycomb UI, OS, and SDK, and links to deeper information on each.

The event was livestreamed by Jason Thrasher,

who is working to streamline the process on our YouTube channel. It went well, and soon we'll be able to livestream GTUG meetings from around the world, easily.

Here's some links:

Their I/O talk on May 10th
The slide deck
Android Developer Blog, with lots more info.

Other related I/O talks of note:

Thanks, Chet and Romaine!

Google I/O 2011: GTUG BarCamp

2011-05-16T19:23:00.000-07:00

It certainly was Google I/O.

For the GTUG organizers who gathered from around the world, even more so.

The first thing that greeted us was a big red arrow at Moscone Center, which happened to be exactly what I was looking for on Google Maps. This was Tuesday, opening morning.

Our adventure at I/O began two days earlier at the Sunday GTUG BarCamp, an "unconference" for GTUG organizers on the subject of... well an unconference can cover a wide variety of topics, with no set agenda. It's exactly like a conference, except the opposite.

The rules of an unconference are:

The people who come are the best people who could have come.
Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened.
It starts when it starts.
It's over when it's over.
The Law of Two Feet: If you want to go to a different session, get up and go.

We started by making up session topics right then and there, and writing them all on big colorful sticky notes. These were gathered up and distributed on a board, until we had four periods of five sessions each.

An unconference doesn't have a leader so much as a guy who moves the sticky notes around. Everything is done more or less by consensus and ad hoc. Once we had our session schedule, we broke up into groups and began discussions.

You can find all our notes on the GTUG Wiki BarCamp Page.

That's how we came up with our session list:

1A Broadcasting to Distributed Communities

1B Fragmentation and Focus

1C Running a Startup on App Engine

1D Converting Members to Presenters

1Z Getting to Know Your GTUG

2A Global Hackathon

2B Creating a Nonprofit

2C Mobile Development in the (near) Future

2D How to Present According to Batman

2Z How to Make Your Group Delicious

3A GTUG Magazine

3B How to Create a Playground for Cats

3C Writing Code Without Face Time

3D Development Experiences

3Z Tools for GTUG Managers

4A Google Involvement in GTUGs

4B Developers and Designers Collaborate

4C Android for Consumers

4Z Bootcamps and Other Hands-on Events

What seemed to excite people most was Tools for GTUG Managers, and we spent much of the time since brainstorming ideas on that topic. From geolocated android applications to a web clearinghouse, and global collaboration between the different GTUG chapters. Hopefully we'll have more to announce soon. Until then, so long from GTUG!

Meetup on Google TV in Google Campus.

2010-12-06T15:42:00.000-08:00

Agenda. Photo by Paul Masquelier.

This meetup on December 1 was with an agenda shown in the picture to the left. Unfortunately, as happens to the best of us, it was not possible to set up the demo in time, and this paved the way for a substantially longer, and livelier, Q & A session after the presentation.

Before the main presentation, there were several announcements:

A Winter 2011 course at Foothill College on Application Software Development with AJAX by Elaine Haight
A Winter 2011 course at Foothill College on Using Cascading Style Sheets for Design by Newton Chan
Job openings at Logitech by Pat Ransil
Job openings at Appirio by Iein Valdez

Andres Ferrate and Daniels Lee, Developer Advocates in Google, discussed salient features of Google TV by showing several Google TV applications, built using the Android SDK, scheduled to be released in 1Q 2011:

Andres Ferrate. Photo by Paul Masquelier.

Daniels Lee. Photo by Paul Masquelier.

YouTube
Chrome
Flixster
Chow
Cartoon Network
MeeGenius
Net-a-porter
Vimeo

In these days, where several HTML5 enthusiasts advocate the use of HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript combination for creating rich Internet applications, why Android SDK for Google TV applications? It must be that the HTML5-CSS3-JavaScript combination comes up short somehow - ? - in creating Google TV applications.

Several interesting aspects of man-machine interface design were also mentioned:

Leanback experience, where the TV viewer would have no reason to lean forward, and can operate the contents on the TV screen by leaning back on a couch.
10% minimum padding is recommended in the use of the TV screen real estate
An aspect ratio of 16:9 is recommended for effective viewing.

A final interesting part of the evening was the use of software called JUG Spinner Wheel to select winners of raffle of 4 Logitech Revue devices from among the attendees of the meetup. After all, what is a technology meetup if technology is not made use of to the hilt? The attendees' list must have been automatically captured by the JUG Spinner Wheel!

Overall, a very satisfactory introduction to Google TV and its applications.

GTUG Meetup on Google Apps Script: A Review.

2010-10-07T23:51:00.000-07:00

Cross-posted from The Browser Platform, Clouds & Computing

This meeting on 6 October 2010 was primarily about Google Apps Script by Martin Omander, Developer Advocate at Google.

After a greeting by Van Riper, lead organizer of the Silicon Valley GTUG Meetup Group, the following initial announcements were made.

Bess Ho gave out the discount code for Paypal X Innovate conference; also mentioned games design, Oct 12.
Kevin Nilson talked about the upcoming Silicon Valley Code Camp, October 9-10.
Wesley Chun, the chief organizer of the Google tracks in the camp, briefed the audience on what is to come in those tracks.

The main talk began by showing the home page of Google Apps Script:
Subsequently, Martin went through examples of different functions created by Google and others in the Script Gallery, e.g., =weather(), =getTweets(). He also went through a simple mail merge example.

The message was that, basically, if you were familiar with JavaScript and related concepts of HTML, CSS, etc., you could create an application that made use of information from across several Google products such as Calendar, Doc List, etc. and 3rd party services. You could create scripts that made use of SOAP and REST services within the script.

He mentioned that Motorola has created IT portfolio tracking system in Google Apps Script.

When asked what kinds of debugging facilities existed, he showed the debug icon in the script editor window, but it wouldn't work for some reason.

If you submitted your own application or scripts to the gallery, then others could make use of your submitted functionality through an URL.

Fusion table support is not yet available.

Is there a published roadmap? No. Martin hoped they will get to it some day.

Can you access spreadsheet visualization application? Martin didn't know.

Google Apps Script T-shirt were given away to those that had done subatantial Google Apps Script implementations. Recipients:

ourprojectteam.com, creating a project management application
Karl Pohl, an independent software engineer, who has created stock portfolio analysis application using Google Apps Script. At the moment, he wants to keep the application for himself, thank you very much, as he has been able to extract 'good' money from the stock market using his Google Apps Script implementation.

Paul Masquelier has uploaded the photographs that were taken at the event.

Overall, a very good introduction to the subject matter of Google Apps Script.

GTUG Campout and Beyond

2009-08-22T11:14:00.000-07:00

Kevin Nilson submitted this excellent guest post about GTUG Campout to the Google Code Blog. I won't repeat everything he said again here. If you do nothing else, you should at least see the sketches, photos and video from the event and the San Jose Mercury News Article about camp. Needless to say, the event was a tremendous success and you can expect it to become an annual summer event for the Silicon Valley GTUG going forward.

Kevin and I are now feverishly working on plans for Silicon Valley Code Camp at Foothill College on October 3-4, 2009. This will be the fourth annual Code Camp. Silicon Valley GTUG is a Community Sponsor of the camp again this year. We had more than 700 developers attend last year's camp and this one is shaping up to be even bigger and better. Attendance is FREE, but, the space and the sponsorship funds do have limits. So, I recommend signing up sooner than later because registration may be capped at some point.

On the future meetings front, we have one of the main members of the Guice team, Jesse Wilson, coming to present at our September Meeting. At our November Meeting, the topic will be Google Health. We will have an overview of what Google Health is plus several related application demos including two Google Wave applications created during GTUG Campout: Chief Medical Officer and Patient Aware Wave. No specific plans for October or December yet, but, you can always contact Kevin Nilson or Van Riper to suggest a topic. Suggestions that include speaker recommendations along with speaker contact info are more likely to be realized.

That's All Folks!

GTUG Party in San Francisco on May 26th

2009-05-09T15:43:00.000-07:00

Google and the Silicon Valley GTUG are sponsoring this party in San Francisco for Google Technology enthusiasts on the night before Google I/O officially kicks off. People arriving early for the conference and the local members of Silicon Valley GTUG are invited to this party. For those interested in presenting, the room will be setup to allow for some low key lightning talks throughout the evening.

Although this is a free event open to the public, the party space at Google's San Francisco office can hold a maximum of 200 people. Please register in advance to reserve your spot at this party. If you are interested in giving a lightning talk that night, please add yourself to the Lightning Talk List AFTER you have registered through the SV-GTUG Meetup site for the party. Thanks!

Python 3.0 & GAE/J on April 8th

2009-04-16T19:18:00.000-07:00

Thanks again to Paul Masquelier, we have this Picasa web album to share with pictures from the April SV-GTUG meeting:

We also recorded the April meeting and it will be available soon on YouTube. When it is ready, I will update this blog post to include a link to the video. By the way, we have a dedicated Google Technology User Groups Channel on YouTube now. This is not just for the Silicon Valley GTUG, but, the videos in the channel so far are mostly from past SV-GTUG meetings.

After the demos of various OpenSocial applications to start the evening, Alex Martelli gave a fairly detailed overview of the changes in Python 3.0. I was impressed that in many cases the changes were simplifications rather than additions to the language. The better support for Unicode in Python 3.0 was enough by itself to convince me to upgrade. Alex was kind enough to share his slides in PDF format.

Jeff Scudder was up next to talk about Google App Engine. The original plan was for him to talk about the Python runtime. However, that was before the Campfire One Announcement just 24 hours earlier about the early access release of the new Java runtime for GAE. So, Jeff took advantage of the timing to spend much of his time talking about and taking questions with respect to the new Java runtime for GAE. He also discussed some of the new general features of GAE like cron job support and data import support.

If you are interested in trying the new Java runtime, you had better hurry. The early access is being capped at the first 10K developers to sign up. If you were following the SV-GTUG Twitter Feed, you would have heard about the early access program along with link to register on the night the announcement was made. This is exactly the kind of time sensitive information that will be going out first on our group twitter feed from now on.

We concluded the evening with a short talk by Dave Westwood, founder of BuddyPoke and GAE Developer. BuddyPoke is the poster child for the scalability claims of GAE. In just one year, they have had 40 million installs of their OpenSocial application for Orkut/MySpace and GAE scaled to the challenge as advertised.

Our next meeting will be covering the Android Platform on Wednesday, May 6th. Please be sure to sign up early. This could easily be another sold out event. We will also be raffling off one more Google I/O Free Pass on May 6th. Sam Gu was the lucky raffle winner for a Google I/O Free Pass at the April 8th meeting.

Our meeting timing has been excellent so far this year. Kevin Nilson and I are not Google employees. We really do not have Google insider information. It was pure dumb luck on our part to schedule a GAE meeting for the day after GAE/J was publicly launched. Similarly, we had no idea that the early release of the Android 1.5 SDK would be this month. We should have more details soon for the May 6th meeting, but, I think it is a safe bet that Dan Morrill will be devoting a fair amount of his talk in May to the new 1.5 SDK release for the Android Platform.

That's All Folks!

The Times They Are A-Changin'

2009-03-15T18:27:00.000-07:00

Welcome to our new Blogger hosted blog. It replaces the old blog that we were hosting ourselves using JRoller. I've migrated the few posts we had made so far from the old blog to this new one. To steal a verse from an old Bob Dylan song:

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

The times are a-changin' for SV-GTUG. In addition to the blog hosting change, we just migrated from our old web site to our new meetup site. We have a dedicated GTUGs YouTube Channel for hosting our event videos going forward. Plus, you can now stay connected to SV-GTUG and your fellow group members on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Finally, Google is showing GTUGs around the world some love primarily through the efforts of Googler Stephanie Liu. Stephanie was instrumental in getting Googler Roman Nurik to create this new GTUG Logo:

We have not been very good with respect to blogging about our past events. That is another thing that will be a-changin'. Personally, I still don't have enough time to do this blog justice. However, I am hoping we can get some help from the community with SV-GTUG members as major contributors to this group blog going forward.

Finally, I think the message of this song is so appropriate for our group. Technology keeps evolving at a faster and faster pace right before our eyes. It really does feel like it is necessary to keep swimming in the stream of new technologies or you will start sinking and get left behind. Come swim with us at future GTUG meetings because technology keeps a-changin'. =)

Using the Google Collections Library for Java

2008-08-15T21:28:00.000-07:00

If you missed this meeting, it was recorded and it is now available on YouTube in two parts:

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeO_J2OcHYM
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ni_KEkHfto

Please note: The slides within the video are easier to read when you choose the high resolution video option. However, you can also download a crystal clear version of the slides in PDF format from the Google Collections Library project's downloads section.

After a nice introduction by Josh Bloch, Kevin Bourrillion dived into his talk. I won't rehash it blow by blow here, but, Kevin made two important points at the beginning that I will reiterate. First, Jared Levy and Kevin are the two primary authors of this library at Google. However, many Googlers have made contributions to the library and Josh Bloch in particular has provided them with a lot of guidance in their efforts. Second, this library is not intended as a replacement for the JDK collection classes. Rather, they complement and extend the core JDK collection classes. Kevin strongly urged anyone that was not already intimately familiar with the JDK collection classes to spend some time with them before attempting to take advantage of the additional functionality in the Google Collections Library.

Thanks to Paul Masquelier, we also have this public Picasa web album to share with pictures from the meeting.

That's All Folks!

Mapping The Votes with Michael Geary

2008-04-07T00:15:00.000-07:00

For our April meeting, Michael Geary gave a rapid fire demo of several different Maps and Mapplets for viewing the results so far from the 2008 primary elections. In the process, he showed us lots of tips and tricks both for server-side scripting of map data and client-side usage of the Google Maps API. He also covered the interaction and performance differences between using Google Maps directly and using Mapplets. He has already written a fairly detailed blog post of his own covering the material he presented that night. The video of his talk is now available online.

Special thanks go to Googlers Mano Marks and Pamela Fox for allowing us to co-host this final meeting in the current Google GEO Developer Series. Just before Michael took the stage, Pamela provided an introduction to Google Gadgets and how Mapplets fit in that universe as a special variation of Gadgets. We would also like to thank Dick Wall for giving us a brief update on the Android Platform during the networking hour this month. As some of you may recall, Dick was the main presenter discussing Android at our February meeting The video of Dick's Android Update, Pamela's Gadgets Intro, and all the map demos mentioned below is available online here.

We continue to tinker with our GTUG meeting format. We are looking for ways to get more group member involvement in the meetings. We initially tried technical breakout sessions after the main presentation. People typically were most interested in continuing on with Q&A with the main presenter though. Next, we tried technical breakout sessions before the main presentation. We didn't get much traction with that approach either. At this meeting, we invited group members to do brief demos during the networking hour. The demos in order of appearance were:

Java User Groups International Map: Van Riper did a demo of using basic KML for mapping locations of international organizations like the JUGs Community. Links: Google Docs Presentation, Blog Post, Wiki Page

Tools for working with the Google Transit Feed Spec: Tom Brown demonstrated two open source utilities. Schedule Viewer is a Python program for viewing the contents of a Google Transit Feed Spec feed on a map. It's a diagnostic program intended for those creating a feed. KMLWriter is an application for plotting a feed's stops in a KML file for viewing in Google Earth

Putting Video on the Map: Dan Rummel, Justin Cutillo and David Rothschild from Seero gave an entertaining demo that included real-time uploading of video (of them demoing Seero) to a Google Earth application projected on screen for all to see during the demo itself. Fun stuff! Links: Introductory Video, How Seero Uses KML

Weather Data in Google Earth: Brian Hamlin showed us a humongous amount of weather data in Google Earth. This was interesting stuff, but, be warned that you will need LOTS of RAM to view this data in Google Earth with reasonable performance.

Google Maps API for Street View: Pamela Fox showed us how easy it is to use Street View functionality with the Google Maps API. She also showed us examples from the Demo Gallery.

KML Library: Mano Marks showed us libkml. This is Google's library for use with applications that want to parse, generate and operate on KML. It is an implementation of the candidate OGC KML 2.2 standard. It is written in C++ and bindings are available to Java, Python, Ruby, Perl and PHP.

Until we decide to tinker with the meeting format again, there will be opportunities going forward to give your own brief demos at one of our meetings. If you have an application of Google Technology that you would like to briefly demo during the networking hour at a future meeting, please contact us.

Android Event a Great Success

2008-02-09T23:47:00.000-08:00

For our second GTUG meeting Dick Wall gave an excellent talk on Android. We capped the registration at 200 and sold out several days before the event. Dick was very prepared and was giving a presentation he had given before. This was nice because Dick did a great job of pointing out past questions and pointing out when we needed to pay close attention. Dick's presentation was among the best presentations I have seen in a long time.

It is amazing how much interest there is in Android considering no phones are on the market yet. I am looking forward to watching the mobile environment grow as Android evolves. A few weeks ago I attended the Mobile and Embedded Developer Days. At the event I was surprised to hear that all the Sun mobile experts were instructed by Sun not to download Android and not to read anything about Android. It will be interesting to see how Sun works out its differences with Google. At the Mobile and Embedded Developer Days I also met JavaFX expert Jim Weaver. Jim is a really nice guy who is interested in helping developers get started with JavaFX. Jim even does a daily blog on learning JavaFX at his blog http://learnjavafx.typepad.com/. I spoke with Jim about writing a JavaFX based Raffle tool. I had attended No Fluff Just Stuff conferences where they had a nice web based raffle tool. I had been speaking with Van about us writing a raffle tool. I never had time to get started on the project so meeting Jim seemed like the perfect opportunity to ask Jim if he'd be interested in taking on the challenge. A few days later I had the first version in hand.

You can read more about the spinner on Jim's blog post http://learnjavafx.typepad.com/weblog/2008/01/spinning-wheel.html. The spinner worked great and its nice to help get the word out about JavaFX.

SV-GTUG Off To A Great Start With Google Web Toolkit (GWT)

2008-02-09T22:23:00.000-08:00

The newly formed Silicon Valley Google Technology User Group is off to a great start. Van and I run both the Silicon Valley Web Developer Java User Group and Silicon Valley Google Technology User Group so we decided our first GTUG meeting would be a joint meeting of the two groups.

Bob Vawter from the GWT team spoke. In the past I had always ignored GWT because I felt it odd to write Java to generate JavaScript. I felt it would force UI guys into an environment that was not comfortable. After only a few minutes of the presentation I was sold on GWT. The main selling features that persuaded me were:

Using an IDE for JavaScript

Compile Time Checking

Out of the Box Cross-browser support

Small distribution that is browser specific

For a long time I had been wanting to write a comet based chat application. Now I was wanting to try out GWT so I finally got started writing the long overdue comet based chat application. You can try out my chat application for yourself on my website http://javaclimber.com/portal/portal/myportal/Chat. I was amazed how I instantly felt comfortable writing GWT. I have been writing JavaScript for most of my career, but after only a few minutes messing with GWT I found my productivity to write GWT was higher than my productivity to write cross-browser JavaScript. I also have quite a bit of experience with Prototype and JSON while doing side-work for FoxTrax-Online.com. I found GWT had many advantages over Prototype and JSON.

In the past I have done quite a bit of Swing coding, so I think that is why GWT came so natural to me. When you think about it, it is strange to model a web framework around Swing. I didn't mind the Swing like feel, but I wonder how traditional web developers will adapt if they have never written Swing.

The biggest struggle I had with my comet chat application was getting it deployed. The documentation I found didn't have much details on deployment. After much waisted time I finally figured out you needed to define each service as a Servlet in your web.xml. In hosted mode this is not necessary.

Among the audience was Matt Raible author of AppFuse. You can read Matt's blog about the event here.

Overall Bob's presentation was a success for me. I found a new technology to add to my toolkit that I think will increase my productivity. Most of the audience seemed to be inexperienced with GWT. I hope other GWT rookies like myself went out and got their hands wet with GWT.