All Your Photos, Pictures In the Cloud With Pictarine:

Pictarine is a photo management web application, launched in 2010, that allows people to easily manage and share all of their photos from Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Twitter and other sites. Pictarine developers Guillaume Martin and Maxime Rafalimanana have contributed the following post discussing their experiences using Google App Engine and Google Web Toolkit.

Read the comprehensive blog post by Pictarine developers about choice of the tools for the application building, Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and Google App Engine. See how they managed to blur the line between desktop and the cloud when it come to the Photos, and pictures.

Perhaps it is your niche, to erase the line between mobile world and the cloud!

Google Web Toolkit Blog: Pictarine: pictures in the cloud

CSSI (Computer Science Summer Institute) Fast-tracking CS Young Talent

Sometimes I wish these facilities were available to us when we were about to enter the Universities as it might have changed the course of our lives, at least the courses we took at the college!.

Google's Computer Science Summer Institute (CSSI) encourages Computer Science to incoming Freshmen. Last year it managed to steer 24 out of 29 towards selecting Computer Science as their major.

With success Google decided to increase the numbers of students it involve in the process. Google usually invite 30 young developer to the Googleplex for three weeks of intensive course in Programming in a wide range withing the field;

"We wanted to equip students with a comprehensive toolset to tackle the world of web and mobile applications. In the first two weeks of the program we introduced students to App Inventor for Android, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Python, Django and App Engine. That sounds like a lot, and it is, but the students far surpassed our expectations and demanded more. In the final week of the program, they built some spectacular web applications, inspiring us with their passion and their enthusiasm for experimentation. They wrote online games, embedded Google Calendar's self-scheduler onto their websites and built blogging services. Some even began exploring the nitty-gritty details of computer graphics. Every one of our 56 students had the satisfaction of developing a publicly-available service on the web, hosted on Google’s servers. "

So if you are a freshman / Freshwoman considering Computer Science, this might be a good thing to try. At leaset it will introduce you to the world of Google within Google itself.



Official Google Blog: Fast-tracking young web developers at CSSI

Create Talk Bots With XMPP Support On Google App Engine

Google App Engine where developers develop and launch web applications, on non other than Google's own infrastructure.

There are many apps that depends and developed using the Google App Engine. Google itself released apps like, translation bot that I constantly use on the Google talk (We wrote about the Translating chat bot a while back). I always wanted to have bot like that to help me and others but developing such a bot was not an easy task.
But now the tables have turned. Today Google App Engine team announced the release of an API that makes it very simple to build Talk bots on top of App Engine. I am looking forward to the clash of the bots!

Google App Engine SDK1.2.5 has more than just XMPP support, among usual bug fixes, tweaks, and API improvements, it now includes a Windows-based version of a useful tool, The Google App Engine Launcher!
The release notes have more information as well.

The whole technical features and more info is available from this fantastic article on Google App Engine Blog;
App Engine SDK 1.2.5 released for Python and Java, now with XMPP support