Who's @ Google I/O

April 16, 2009


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We frequently hear that developers want to hear from peers who've built interesting applications. That's why we're excited that this year's Google I/O (May 27th - 28th in San Francisco) will involve more developers from the community at large. Today, we're raising the virtual curtain on some of the developers who'll be participating in Google I/O this year.

These developers represent a wide range of companies and apps - all of which are strong examples of Google developer products and open web technologies in action. They'll be presenting technical sessions and demoing their apps at the Developer Sandbox, a new addition to Google I/O featuring demo station "pods". With so many developers at Google I/O, this is a great opportunity for event attendees to check out their apps, ask questions, exchange ideas, and meet new people.

Given the recent App Engine launch, we thought it'd be fitting to introduce a subset of the App Engine developers who will be demoing or presenting at Google I/O:

  • Salesforce.com
    Force.com is the enterprise cloud computing platform offered by Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com is committed to letting developers take advantage of the web as the ultimate platform. Force.com developer evangelist Ron Hess will lead a session outlining how to connect the Force.com SOAP Web Services API to Google App Engine for Java. The project includes an open source Web Service Client that has been completely ported to App Engine. The session will discuss the porting effort, how to use URLFetch to achieve cross- cloud communication and demonstrate a sample integration between App Engine and the Force.com SOAP API.

  • ThoughtWorks and SpringSource
    Guillaume Laforge is the official Groovy Project Manager for SpringSource, and the spec lead of JSR-241, the Java Specification Request that standardizes the Groovy dynamic language. Ola Bini of ThoughtWorks is the creator of the language Ioke and has been one of the core developers for JRuby since 2006. Guillaume and Ola will be speaking about running Groovy (and Grails) and JRuby on top of Google App Engine for Java, respectively.

  • Walk Score (a project of Front Seat)
    Walk Score uses App Engine for the Walk Score API that serves Walk Score data to millions of real estate listings daily. The Walk Score website also uses Google Local Search for their scoring algorithm and Google Maps API for displaying walkability of addresses and heat map views of neighborhoods and cities. The three developers behind Walk Score will be leading a session, AppEngine Nitty-Gritty: Scalability, Fault Tolerance, and Integrating Amazon EC2, outlining their experiences scaling on App Engine and combining App Engine with external services including EC2. They'll also be on hand at the Developer Sandbox.

  • Best Buy
    Giftag, Best Buy's browser add-on for clipping, saving, and sharing web page snippets, launched on App Engine just before Black Friday last year. Using the hProduct open standard and App Engine's datastore API, Giftag enables users to add items to one or more wishlists, then share these via the App Engine-hosted front-end or Facebook. The engineers behind Giftag will be at the Developer Sandbox. (Check out their blog post and video where the team talks about migrating to App Engine)

  • BuddyPoke
    BuddyPoke uses App Engine for fluid and cost effective scalability to handle a rapidly growing user base of over 36 million OpenSocial users. Dave Westwood, founder of BuddyPoke, will be part of the Developer Sandbox. (Check out Dave's video talking about scaling on App Engine)

  • 3scale networks
    3scale provides a Python plug-in that integrates seamlessly to App Engine so that developers can put all their resources into their API's core functionalities. User management, access control, billing and payments can be easily externalized with 3scale for those APIs that run on top of App Engine. The 3scale team will be part of the Developer Sandbox.

To check out speakers, visit the speakers page. To see who'll be demoing at the Sandbox, check out the Developer Sandbox page.

Keep in mind what you see currently on these pages is still 'in progress'. Over the next few weeks, we'll be regularly updating the I/O website with more sessions, speakers, and Developer Sandbox demos, so keep checking back. And each week on the Code Blog, we'll give you a closer look into who these developers are, including guest blog posts authored by them that share their development experiences and tips. (The AJAX API team's gotten a headstart on this)

Finally, we can't end a blog post about Google I/O without a (shameless) plug for actually signing up for the event, so here it is:

<shameless plug>
Early registration for Google I/O ends May 1, so if you're thinking of attending, now's a good time. Sign up at code.google.com/io. We look forward to meeting you!
</shameless plug>

*You can also follow our tweets: @googleio.