Adding some style to the wiki on Google Code

By Nathan Ingersoll and Jason Robbins, Google Code

Based on user feedback, we added a few highly requested features to the project hosting wiki on Google Code.

To improve navigation from one wiki page to another, we added side navigation across wiki pages (e.g doctype docs). You can add a 'Wiki sidebar' by specifying the wiki file that describes your side navigation in the Administration tab under Wiki settings.

To help navigate a wiki page, we added the ability to add a generated table of contents. To add a table of contents, just copy the following syntax to your wiki page.

<wiki:toc max_depth="1" />

Finally, to improve the style of your wiki pages we have added some html support. For more information on what html is supported, take a look at the documentation.

As always, we look forward to your feedback.

Zend Framework 1.7 with AMF support released!!!

Zend Framework 1.7.0 is now available from the Zend Framework download site: http://framework.zend.com/download/latest
This release introduces many new components and features, including:

• Zend_Amf with support for AMF0 and AMF3 protocols
• Dojo Toolkit 1.2.1
• Support for dijit editor available in the Dojo Toolkit
• Zend_Service_Twitter
• ZendX_JQuery in extras library
• Metadata API in Zend_Cache
• Google book search API in Zend_Gdata
• Preliminary support for GData Protocol v2 in Zend_Gdata
• Support for skip data processing in Zend_Search_Lucene
• Support for Open Office XML documents in Zend_Search_Lucene indexer
• Performance enhancements in Zend_Loader, Zend_Controller, and server components
• Zend_Mail_Storage_Writable_Maildir enhancements for mail delivery
• Zend_Tool in incubator
• Zend_Text_Table for formatting table using characters
• Zend_ProgressBar
• Zend_Config_Writer
• ZendX_Console_Unix_Process in the extras library
• Zend_Db_Table_Select support for Zend_Paginator
• Global parameters for routes
• Using Chain-Routes for Hostname-Routes via Zend_Config
• I18N improvements
  • Application wide locale for all classes
  • Data retrieving methods are now static
  • Additional cache handling methods in all I18N classes
  • Zend_Translate API simplified
• File transfer enhancements
  • Support for file elements in subforms
  • Support for multifile elements
  • Support for MAX_FILES_SIZE in form
  • Support for breaking validation chain
  • Support for translation of failure ,messages
  • New IsCompressed, IsImage, ExcludeMimeType, ExcludeExtension validators
  • Support for FileInfo extension in MimeType validator
• Zend_Db_Table_Select adapater for Zend_Paginator
• Support for custom adapters in Zend_Paginator
• More flexible handling of complex types in Zend_Soap

In addition, almost three hundred bugs have been fixed:
http://framework.zend.com/issues/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?requestId=10903

-By Parthiv Patel

Parthiv Patel

Bhaishri Info Solution

Sr. PHP Developer

Limdi Chowk, AT PO. Nar, Di. Anand

Nar, Gujarat

388150

India

pparthiv2412@gmail.com

7383343029

DOB: 12/24/1986

Google Developer Days 2008 have come to an end

By Alyssa England, Google Developer Programs



We've concluded Google Developer Days 2008, a set of one-day developer events. They started in Yokohama, Japan on June 10 and ended in Tel Aviv, Israel on November 2. Attendees had the opportunity to learn about products such as Android, Chrome, OpenSocial, and App Engine and interacted with Google developers in hands-on code labs.

We posted the presentations and photos; hopefully they'll continue to be a useful resource for you. Thanks for making these such great events!

A Toast to Code Jam 2008

By Bartholomew Furrow, Google Code Jam Team

Cheers to the 100 Code Jammers who made it to the Code Jam finals in Mountain View today! We hope you enjoyed the competition as much as we enjoyed seeing you type furiously, solve ridiculously challenging puzzles, and meet other programming pros. Speaking of pros, a team that included past Code Jam winners used their 20% time to create a new platform that allowed everyone to program in the language of their choice. It was, as you know, a long road to the last round of Code Jam. More than 11,000 of you participated in online rounds, 500 semi-finalists reached the regional stage and 100 finalists from 23 different countries competed this morning. We're pleased to finally announce the day's results: Tiancheng Lou of China took home the $10,000 Grand Prize. Zeyuan Zhu from China won second place, Bruce Merry from United Kingdom came in third and cash prizes went to the other finalists.

Congrats to all and see you at the next Jam!

Improving the issue tracker for larger projects

By Jason Robbins, Google Code

When we created the issue tracker for Project hosting on Google Code our goal was to keep things simple. We had found that most issue trackers include too many fields and options that aren't applicable to a given issue. As a result, we intentionally did not implement issue relationships like is-blocked-on and is-duplicate-of. For most of the projects that we host, simply adding a comment that mentions the other issue is enough information to get the job done.

Now we host more large projects, and some projects that started small with us have grown large. So, starting today, we are offering a formal 'Blocked on' field. And, when you close an issue as 'Duplicate', you can merge it into the original issue. For more information, take a look at our issue tracker documentation.

For projects that regularly triage issues, you can now pick where to go after you have finished updating an issue.

We hope that these changes help make the issue tracker as easy to use on larger projects as it is for smaller ones.

As always, we look forward to your feedback.

Get Out and Vote! (on Google Code)

By Mike Marchak, Google Code Team

This election season, the Google Code Team has been inspired by democracy. We have been looking at code.google.com and thinking about ways to make the site better for our users. For example, we updated the homepage a few weeks ago to make it easier to find some of our most popular products. However, we wanted to give our users the right to vote. So, when Google Moderator was released to the public, we thought it would be the perfect tool to get your feedback and ideas. The best part is that you can vote on good ideas so they move to the top of the list and vote against bad ideas so they don't. We added a feedback link in the footer on Google Code, but you can get started using the link below.

Vote on Google Code!

We plan to review your feedback to help us prioritize improvements to Google Code. We'll also respond periodically to the highest rated comments in the Google Code Blog.

So get out and vote on Google Code!

Announcing the Google Search Appliance virtual edition for developers

By Vivek Haldar, Enterprise Search Team

Ever wanted to write code against Google search technology, test your apps, and see how it all integrates into your development environment without having to pay a thing? If you're an IT administrator, you'll have that chance with the new virtual edition of the Google Search Appliance. The Google Search Appliance virtual edition is for non-commercial, development purposes only, and gives developers the opportunity to test against the features of the physical Google Search Appliance.

The Google Search Appliance virtual edition provides a free test bed for the Google Search Appliance - our solution for securely searching enterprise content behind the corporate firewall - helping ensure a smooth transition to the production-ready hardware. If your organization is considering adopting an enterprise search solution, the virtual edition platform gives your team the flexibility to build applications against the Google Search Appliance, try different configuration scenarios, explore proofs-of-concept and test the APIs supported by Google enterprise search technology. As part of testing with the virtual edition, you can:

• Index up to 50,000 documents
• Use the Connector Framework to index proprietary document repositories
• Use the Feed API and metadata search to index information with unique formats
• Use Onebox to retrieve information from real-time services
• Take the authentication and secure search capabilities for a test drive
• Customize the search results page, or extract it in XML format for use on another web site

These features might come in handy, particularly if your existing environment contains the array of legacy systems, databases, servers and integration architecture typical of most large organizations. And because it's free, your boss might give you an extra week's vacation just for trying it out (don't quote us on that). You can download Google Search Appliance virtual edition software onto any server that is supported by VMWare virtualization. To learn more and get started, click here. And since we always love feedback, feel free to drop by our developer community or send your thoughts to enterprise-gsa-virtual@google.com.

Introducing Powerful Visualizations for your server-side data

By Itai Raz, Google Visualization API Team

Today, we're publicly documenting the Google Visualization API's open-wire protocol, thus dramatically expanding the capabilities of this API beyond what had been available since we first launched in March of this year. Organizations can now expose their server-side data, such as in SQL databases and even in Excel spreadsheets, and display this data through visualizations from our growing directory. This flexibility makes it possible to connect easily almost any data source to a wealth of 40+ visualizations, including standard pie and line charts and complex heat maps and motion charts.

To make it even easier for developers to get started, we have documented an open-source Python library that enables any Python developer to quickly start using the API. What we find particularly cool about this library is that it also runs on Google's AppEngine. You don't even need to be an owner of your own servers to expose your data: You can place it on AppEngine and use the Visualization API to expose your data in meaningful, insightful ways in dashboards and reports. Expect to see additional server-side tools for the Visualization API in the near future.

Moreover, this week at the Dreamforce conference, Salesforce announced they've created tools, including code snippets and API harnesses, to make the Google Visualization API even easier to use. Salesforce customers can now quickly and easily add dashboards and custom reporting applications over their Salesforce data and publish these on any webpage. ISVs and BI firms such as Panorama and Conceptual Clarity, who are already marketing their powerful reporting tools over Google Spreadsheets using the Visualization API, now have access to Salesforce customers. The icing on the cake: since they use the Visualization API, they can address this new market without adding new code to their existing applications.

To learn more about how to implement your data store as a Visualization API data source, by checking out our documentation.