Category Archives: Cloud Computing

Wow, Google Dev Day 2010 in Prague is over and there was lots of interesting information presented in the sessions. Below some notes I took during some of the sessions.

Native Client

• Currently supported languages: C, C++. There are plans to extend the platform for other languages like C# and also to integrate with IDEs like Visual Studio and Eclipse.
• Currently works reliably only in Google Chrome; can be used for extension development.
• Possible use cases: client side encryption, image processing, games
• Native Client is sandboxed in two layers: Native Client Sandbox, Google Chrome Sandbox.
• Additionally certain IO and system calls are blocked.
• Code must be verifiable, which has a size and performance impact.
• http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/

In my opinion Native Client probably won’t become popular in main stream applications, but I see a lot potential for Chrome Extensions.

What’s new in Google App Engine

• AE for Business has been released recently. Main highlights are a Service Level Agreement and SQL support.
• New features and API’s
  • Channel API: bidirectional client server communication.
  • Mapper API: Support for full MapReduce. Ideal for dealing with large datasets and distributable problems. App Engine Map Reduce.
  • Multi-Tenancy: Very easily usable by implementing a servlet filter and setting a namespace.
  • Matcher API: Document matching infrastructure.
  • High Performance Image Processing

All in all App Engine made a much more mature impression than last year. Together with SpringRoo, GWT and the Spring Source Tool Suite it’s a great environment for rapid application development …. if you are into Java …

Storage, Big Query, Prediction API

• While App Engine is a Platform As A Service (PAAS) offering, Storage, BigQuery and Prediction API are the first products of Google’s Infrastructure As A Service (IAAS) offering.
• Storage: essentially like Amazon S3. Compatible with S3′s REST API.
• BigQuery and Prediction API builds on top of Storage
• Data is stored in US data centers, but distributed through Google’s global network. Thus latency is very low.
• Currently no Amazon-like areas are supported.
• Comes with a command line util: gsutil. gsutil can be used together with S3, too.
• Prediction API is an API to Google’s machine learning algorithms. Essentially you can upload a dataset to Google Storage, train the algorithm and then ask for a prediction based on a new input. The algorithms themselves are a blackbox; you don’t have any influence and no way to configure / fine tune them.
• BigQuery: lets you query large datasets with a subset of SQL very quickly. Great for reporting.

Android News

New in Android 2.2

• Licensing Verfication Library and Service
• Application Error Reports (integrated into the market place, including the possibility for customers to provide feedback)
• Just in time compiler: makes native apps 2x – 5x faster
• Uses now V8 Javascript engine: makes web applications 2x – 3x faster
• Device admin API: Enforcing enterprise Security Policies (e.g. max password length, etc)
• Cloud to device messaging: Great for server push. Saves battery on the client side and provides a much better user experience.
• App Data Backup API: Additionally to restoring the users apps on a new device, this gives the developer the opportunity to restore the users application data, too
• Speech API
• Easier configuration of “Install on SD”: simply configure this in your manifest file.