Powerful web applications are a key theme at Google's biggest
developer conference of the year taking place in San
Francisco.
Nearly one billion people are using browsers rooted in open
source technology, which have quintupled their processing power in
less than a year, according to Google.
New functionality in the nascent
HTML 5
specification, which includes improved local storage and
background processing, is also spurring powerful web
applications.
"Bet on the web,"
Vic Gundotra, vice-president of developer products at Google
told attendees on the opening day of the conference.
"Its rate of innovation has dramatically accelerated over the
past 12 months, giving rise to an open web platform that is more
capable and more sophisticated than even a year ago," he said.
Google is using the
I/O 2009
conference, attended by around 3,000 developers, to announce new
products and initiatives to promote application development on the
web.
Google Web Elements
gives developers an easy way to incorporate Google products onto a
website or blog.
This includes content such as Maps, News and YouTube videos, as
well as social comments functionality by Google Friend Connect.
New Java language support in Google App Engine provides
developers with tools to build Ajax web applications.
More than 10,000 Java language applications have been deployed
on App Engine since a preview of Java support was released to a
limited number of developers in April, said Google.
Google has also launched the second phase of the
Android Developer
Challenge, which rewards developers for building applications
for the Android mobile platform.
For Android Developer Challenge 2 (ADC 2), Google will let users
of Android-powered phones take part in the judging process through
the use of an on-phone judging application.
Awards will be presented to the top applications and up to
$250,000 is up for grabs by the overall winner, which will be
announced in November.