The Google AJAX Feed API's got a small addition today in the form of the Dynamic Feed Control.
It is a control that expands on the base FeedControl and allows user's to embed multiple feeds for convenient display on their webpage. It offers several layouts, including our popular horizontal layout similar to the NewsBar, and also two forms of vertical layout. You have access to the full source code. We include default CSS styling, but all of this can be changed to suit your needs. We have also supplied a full programming guide, a wizard for easy setup, and it exists as an iGoogle Gadget so you can add it to your iGoogle homepage.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Direct Access to YouTube Channels
This morning, we made an update to the AJAX Search API that provides you with direct access to YouTube Channels, Most Viewed Videos, Top Rated Videos, and Recently Featured Videos.
As millions of you have already discovered, our insanely popular Video Bar Control is a great way to showcase your favorite videos on your site. Using this new feature, you will be able to "subscribe" a Video Bar to the lonelygirl15 channel, the Most Viewed YouTube Videos Channel, or any combination of channels and search expressions.
As part of this update, the Video Bar Wizard has been modified to make it very easy for you to configure a Video Bar with a mix of channels and search expressions. In addition, the control has been updated to include a new player style and location. This lets you continue to have multiple Video Bars all over your pages while ensuring that the player is always positioned very close to the Video Bar.
If you have an existing Video Bar on your site and just want to modify it in place to take advantage of the new features, take a look at the updated reference guide. What you will find in the reference guide is pretty straight forward:
A query expression of ytchannel:fordmodels will access the fordmodels channel
A query expression of ytfeed:most_viewed will access the Most Viewed YouTube Videos
A query expression of ytfeed:top_rated will access the Top Rated YouTube Videos
A query expression of ytfeed:recently_featured will access Recently Featured YouTube Videos
All of the ytfeed: based expressions also accept time modifiers of .today, .this_week, .this_month, or .all_time. For example, the search expression ytfeed:most_viewed.this_month provides access to the Most Viewed YouTube Videos this month.
We, along with the YouTube team are excited to be able to deliver these features to you and hope that they meet your needs. Make sure to let us know what you think by posting a message or two in our developer forum.
While I have your attention, and while we are discussing Video, I'd like to also show you some clever things that you can do with video that is not hosted on YouTube. One of our good customers, The Real News Network, in addition to their YouTube Channel, has a large collection of high quality video that is exposed via an RSS Feed. Using the AJAX Feed API in conjunction with the Slide Show Control, multimedia developer Allen Booth has built a very compelling Gadget. Try out the gadget on your Google Personalized Home Page. Note how it uses the Slide Show control to show off the high quality video thumbnails present in the feed, and that when you click on a thumbnail, the associated video will play in place using a custom and highly optimized video player. In future posts, we will take a deeper look at this approach.
Update: Something important that I forgot to mention in this post... The new functionality we are delivering today is based in part on the YouTube Data API, part of the large and growing family of GData APIs.
As millions of you have already discovered, our insanely popular Video Bar Control is a great way to showcase your favorite videos on your site. Using this new feature, you will be able to "subscribe" a Video Bar to the lonelygirl15 channel, the Most Viewed YouTube Videos Channel, or any combination of channels and search expressions.
As part of this update, the Video Bar Wizard has been modified to make it very easy for you to configure a Video Bar with a mix of channels and search expressions. In addition, the control has been updated to include a new player style and location. This lets you continue to have multiple Video Bars all over your pages while ensuring that the player is always positioned very close to the Video Bar.
If you have an existing Video Bar on your site and just want to modify it in place to take advantage of the new features, take a look at the updated reference guide. What you will find in the reference guide is pretty straight forward:
A query expression of ytchannel:fordmodels will access the fordmodels channel
A query expression of ytfeed:most_viewed will access the Most Viewed YouTube Videos
A query expression of ytfeed:top_rated will access the Top Rated YouTube Videos
A query expression of ytfeed:recently_featured will access Recently Featured YouTube Videos
All of the ytfeed: based expressions also accept time modifiers of .today, .this_week, .this_month, or .all_time. For example, the search expression ytfeed:most_viewed.this_month provides access to the Most Viewed YouTube Videos this month.
We, along with the YouTube team are excited to be able to deliver these features to you and hope that they meet your needs. Make sure to let us know what you think by posting a message or two in our developer forum.
While I have your attention, and while we are discussing Video, I'd like to also show you some clever things that you can do with video that is not hosted on YouTube. One of our good customers, The Real News Network, in addition to their YouTube Channel, has a large collection of high quality video that is exposed via an RSS Feed. Using the AJAX Feed API in conjunction with the Slide Show Control, multimedia developer Allen Booth has built a very compelling Gadget. Try out the gadget on your Google Personalized Home Page. Note how it uses the Slide Show control to show off the high quality video thumbnails present in the feed, and that when you click on a thumbnail, the associated video will play in place using a custom and highly optimized video player. In future posts, we will take a deeper look at this approach.
Update: Something important that I forgot to mention in this post... The new functionality we are delivering today is based in part on the YouTube Data API, part of the large and growing family of GData APIs.
Search Result Limit Increase
Early this morning we turned on a highly requested feature... The AJAX Search API now supports up to 32 search results as well as pagination through result sets. I understand that this might not match everything that you have been asking for, but at this point in time, delivering a 4x increase in the number of available search results is all that we are able to support.
You can see the new code in action in all of our samples that are based on the default search control:
Tabbed Hello World (web, news, and book tabs)
Custom Search Engine Sample
etc.
The pagination logic is built into the default search control. If you like to code your own search control, we have updated the Raw Searcher sample with a few lines of code that implements result pagination.
For a number of complex reasons, this feature is not implemented in Blog Search or in Local Search.
You can see the new code in action in all of our samples that are based on the default search control:
Tabbed Hello World (web, news, and book tabs)
Custom Search Engine Sample
etc.
The pagination logic is built into the default search control. If you like to code your own search control, we have updated the Raw Searcher sample with a few lines of code that implements result pagination.
For a number of complex reasons, this feature is not implemented in Blog Search or in Local Search.
The PartnerBar - Contextual Cross Linking
A few weeks ago, our team received a call from the Executive Producer of EW.com, the online extension of Entertainment Weekly Magazine. She asked if our Feed API could be used to build a module that they could configure to promote and link to their partner's sites. The result of that phone call is our brand new PartnerBar control.
Working closely with the Executive Producer and production staff, we developed the control to meet the demanding needs of EW.com's site while ensuring that the same code and model could support the rest of the Time Inc. network, as well as the network of sites you are likely to care about. The result is a professional level component that gives the design team complete control over all aspects of styling and site integration and delivers a widely used control at a very low integration cost.
Looking around the web, we see many sites using a wide variety of technologies to provide functionality that is similar to our AJAX based PartnerBar. Depending on a site's architecture and infrastructure, these modules can be somewhat expensive to build, test, maintain, and extend. Sometimes there are cron jobs that have to be run to pull and process partner feeds, sometimes there are back end code and templates that need heavy changes, etc. The PartnerBar that we built is coded as an AJAX control and as a result, it's typically very easy to integrate onto your site, requiring the resources of your HTML team and designers, but not your back end team. At this level of the stack, integrations are typically very efficient in terms of both time and impact on related infrastructure. They are able to take a control like our PartnerBar and go from idea to live in a matter of hours. Our team's design standard: "If you can tweak your HTML template, you can have the PartnerBar (or VideoBar, NewsBar, SlideShow, etc.) up in minutes."
Working closely with the Executive Producer and production staff, we developed the control to meet the demanding needs of EW.com's site while ensuring that the same code and model could support the rest of the Time Inc. network, as well as the network of sites you are likely to care about. The result is a professional level component that gives the design team complete control over all aspects of styling and site integration and delivers a widely used control at a very low integration cost.
Looking around the web, we see many sites using a wide variety of technologies to provide functionality that is similar to our AJAX based PartnerBar. Depending on a site's architecture and infrastructure, these modules can be somewhat expensive to build, test, maintain, and extend. Sometimes there are cron jobs that have to be run to pull and process partner feeds, sometimes there are back end code and templates that need heavy changes, etc. The PartnerBar that we built is coded as an AJAX control and as a result, it's typically very easy to integrate onto your site, requiring the resources of your HTML team and designers, but not your back end team. At this level of the stack, integrations are typically very efficient in terms of both time and impact on related infrastructure. They are able to take a control like our PartnerBar and go from idea to live in a matter of hours. Our team's design standard: "If you can tweak your HTML template, you can have the PartnerBar (or VideoBar, NewsBar, SlideShow, etc.) up in minutes."
Calling all JavaScript developers: Hack the Day Away with Google
Google will be hosting a hackathon at the Mountain View campus on Friday, February 29th from 2pm until 10pm. The hackathon will be covering multiple JavaScript APIs, including our AJAX Search/Feeds APIs. There will be some quick introductions to the APIs, then we'll get you guys coding with our APIs (bring your laptops!).
This is a great chance to learn a bit about APIs you haven't played with and to ask more advanced questions about the ones you love. You'll also have the chance to meet some of the product engineers who create these APIs as well as win prizes and shwag.
This is a great chance to learn a bit about APIs you haven't played with and to ask more advanced questions about the ones you love. You'll also have the chance to meet some of the product engineers who create these APIs as well as win prizes and shwag.
gearsAJAXHelper: Use Google Gears with AJAX APIs for Faster Queries
Google Gears is an API that is known for giving developers the ability to have their webpage viewable offline. However, it can also be used to speed up your website. In the case of the AJAX APIs, you can use the Google Gears local cache and client-side database to have queries load fast with cached data while requests for fresh data are done in the background.
We decided it would be cool to write a small library to make it easy for you AJAX APIs developers to write quick-loading, always fresh searches/feeds. The gearsAJAXHelper has two main features - it allows you to store and return key/value pairs from the local database, and it allows you to choose whether you want all resources files on the page (images, CSS, Javascript, HTML) to automatically be cached in the Gears cache.
The key/value pair database feature let's you store the query/results as a key/value pair. Then, the next time the query is made, the results can be served from the database while fresh results are being retrieved. This dramatically reduces the latency in queries/feed grabs.
The (optional) automatic cacheing of resource files will make it so that each time the user visits your webpage they will be getting resources served from their Google Gears cache, not new versions from the internet. Be careful when using this feature, as you might not want stale content to be served. There is also a refresh function, to clear the Google Gears cache of old files.
Here is a sample application that uses the gearsAJAXHelper to quick-load feeds. Notice that after you have clicked on a candidate (or state) once, the next time you click it will quick-load the results. If the results in the database are stale, you will see fresh results populate the content area. Here's how the gearsAJAXHelper library is used in this code:
gearsAJAXHelper.initialize("election", "election", false);
This initializes the library. The first two parameters you pass in are what you want the name of the Gears LocalServer ResourceStore and Gears Database to be named, respectively. The third parameter specifies whether you want your page's resources to be automatically cached.
Then there are just three other main calls that are used:
gearsAJAXHelper.storeKeyVal(key, value);gearsAJAXHelper.returnKeyVal(key);gearsAJAXHelper.refresh();
When you make any requests, store the results using gearsAJAXHelper.storeKeyVal(key, value). Use the query/feed address as the key, and the results as the value. In the case of the Presidential Application, in the NewsBox.prototype.searchComplete function I wait until the results have been turned into the desired HTML, then I store that as the value and the query as the key.
The NewsBox.prototype.loadNewsBox function is called before any search is executed. In here, I use gearsAJAXHelper.returnKeyVal(key) to check if the query has been done before - if it has we will use the HTML returned. This should be a near-instantaneous operation. Immediately after, I execute the search we would have done so that when it completes fresh results will be served. If the database doesn't have the key/value pair stored, then we will execute the query as normal.
In some cases, you might want to clear the database of old entries as well as clear the Gears LocalServer cache - use the gearsAJAXHelper.refresh function for this.
We decided it would be cool to write a small library to make it easy for you AJAX APIs developers to write quick-loading, always fresh searches/feeds. The gearsAJAXHelper has two main features - it allows you to store and return key/value pairs from the local database, and it allows you to choose whether you want all resources files on the page (images, CSS, Javascript, HTML) to automatically be cached in the Gears cache.
The key/value pair database feature let's you store the query/results as a key/value pair. Then, the next time the query is made, the results can be served from the database while fresh results are being retrieved. This dramatically reduces the latency in queries/feed grabs.
The (optional) automatic cacheing of resource files will make it so that each time the user visits your webpage they will be getting resources served from their Google Gears cache, not new versions from the internet. Be careful when using this feature, as you might not want stale content to be served. There is also a refresh function, to clear the Google Gears cache of old files.
Here is a sample application that uses the gearsAJAXHelper to quick-load feeds. Notice that after you have clicked on a candidate (or state) once, the next time you click it will quick-load the results. If the results in the database are stale, you will see fresh results populate the content area. Here's how the gearsAJAXHelper library is used in this code:
gearsAJAXHelper.initialize("election", "election", false);
This initializes the library. The first two parameters you pass in are what you want the name of the Gears LocalServer ResourceStore and Gears Database to be named, respectively. The third parameter specifies whether you want your page's resources to be automatically cached.
Then there are just three other main calls that are used:
gearsAJAXHelper.storeKeyVal(key, value);gearsAJAXHelper.returnKeyVal(key);gearsAJAXHelper.refresh();
When you make any requests, store the results using gearsAJAXHelper.storeKeyVal(key, value). Use the query/feed address as the key, and the results as the value. In the case of the Presidential Application, in the NewsBox.prototype.searchComplete function I wait until the results have been turned into the desired HTML, then I store that as the value and the query as the key.
The NewsBox.prototype.loadNewsBox function is called before any search is executed. In here, I use gearsAJAXHelper.returnKeyVal(key) to check if the query has been done before - if it has we will use the HTML returned. This should be a near-instantaneous operation. Immediately after, I execute the search we would have done so that when it completes fresh results will be served. If the database doesn't have the key/value pair stored, then we will execute the query as normal.
In some cases, you might want to clear the database of old entries as well as clear the Gears LocalServer cache - use the gearsAJAXHelper.refresh function for this.
Introducing the latest AJAX API: Google Visualization API
We are excited to launch the Google Visualization API, a new API designed for visualizing structured data. The API adds the ability to send queries to data sources and process the response. The first data source that already supports this API is Google Spreadsheets. We are also launching a set of visualization gadgets that use this API.
With this API, you can read data from a data source that supports the API. You can read an entire table, or you can run a query on the data source using the API's query language. The query response is an easy to process data table designed to simplify data visualization. It includes both the underlying values and the formatted values, column types, headers and more.
Use this API to create your own data visualization that is decoupled from data source implementation.
The API is loaded using the Google AJAX API loader: google.load("visualization", "1");
Every data source is identified by a URL. For example, each spreadsheet has it's unique data source URL. Using the google.visualization.Query class, you can run a query on the data source:
var q = new google.visualization.Query(DATA_SOURCE_URL);q.send(responseHandlerCallback);
Use the query language to select specific columns, filter rows, aggregate values and more.
var q = new google.visualization.Query(DATA_SOURCE_URL);q.setQuery("select A, sum(D) group by A");q.send(responseHandlerCallback);
With this API, you can read data from a data source that supports the API. You can read an entire table, or you can run a query on the data source using the API's query language. The query response is an easy to process data table designed to simplify data visualization. It includes both the underlying values and the formatted values, column types, headers and more.
Use this API to create your own data visualization that is decoupled from data source implementation.
The API is loaded using the Google AJAX API loader: google.load("visualization", "1");
Every data source is identified by a URL. For example, each spreadsheet has it's unique data source URL. Using the google.visualization.Query class, you can run a query on the data source:
var q = new google.visualization.Query(DATA_SOURCE_URL);q.send(responseHandlerCallback);
Use the query language to select specific columns, filter rows, aggregate values and more.
var q = new google.visualization.Query(DATA_SOURCE_URL);q.setQuery("select A, sum(D) group by A");q.send(responseHandlerCallback);
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