29 hours of code

Posted by Andrew Bowers, Developer Programs

Google Code, that is. Google Developer Day has officially kicked off in Sydney, Australia, beginning our 29-hour marathon of developer activities around the world. Approximately 5,000 developers will join us today in ten countries to talk about Google's developer products, ask questions, and share their thoughts with Google engineers. For those who can't make it, we're webcasting the sessions from London and California live, and posting recorded sessions from all locations on the website.

A deep dive into technical sessions, free food, swag -- what more could a developer ask for? Well, a few new products would be a good start, and that's what we're providing.

First up is Google Gears, an open source browser extension for enabling offline web applications. Now developers will be able to create web applications that don't need a constant Internet connection to work. Users, meanwhile, can interact with Gears-enabled websites anywhere, whether they're on the couch or on an airplane. With this early release, we hope the community will provide feedback and move towards an industry standard for offline web applications. Read more on the new Gears blog.

An experimental product debuting today is the Google Mashup Editor, an online editor that enables developers to create, test, and deploy mashups and simple web applications from within a browser. Now developers can turn out those weekend projects more quickly. We've also launched a new blog where you can learn more about the Google Mashup Editor and get the latest news.

Finally, we released Google Mapplets yesterday at the Where 2.0 conference. Mapplets are mini-applications that any developer can build on top of Google Maps so that users can easily discover the creative genius and usefulness of the mashup development community. You'll find more about Mapplets here. And we're also quite excited about the interest that has been shown in Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Since its launch last May, there have been over 1 million downloads. You can read more on the GWT blog.

Between Developer Day, the product launches, and GWT's activity, we hope to keep developers around the world busy for a while. But if you run out of things to build, you can always find more ideas on Google Code.