Live blog: Extend the Reach of your Google Apps Environment with Google APIs

Jackie Bodine, Ryan Boyd (Google) and Ron Hess (Salesforce.com)

"Radish" device is shown off first, a Google 20% project. An entirely wireless solar-powered schedule display, that retrieves the calendar events for the room from the Calendar API. Nice project!

What APis are available? Calendar, Contacts, Documents List, Spreadsheets, provisioning, migration, reporting and single sign on. AtomPub is used, with GET, POST, PUT and DELETE, although Google extends this with a data model and batch mode. A standard atom feed is shown, with some extra fields, with the gd prefix.

Google Calendar Sync (for Outlook) is an example of an app built on top of the APIs. You can Create Edit, Delete Calendars and Events, as well as change your ACLs.

Two types of auth, ClientLogin (user/pass) and AuthSub (web token).

There is a very simple Api, three lines of code are all that are required in dotNet to upload a document. There are client libraries for dotNet, Java, Python and objectiveC. There are more details on code.google.com.

Another example is the Google Email Uploader, built on top of the email migration Api.

Some talk now about code.google.com and the resources that are available.

Spreadsheet API capabilities are both by cell and by row.

JSON-in-script output format is used by the APIs - a callback is made when the data is available in JSON format. If the data is only available to people from your domain, you can write a proxy that will authenticate with a non-user account.

Some talk now about appengine, and using the python library. Authentication ties in nicely with apps.

Ron Hess is up now to talk about connecting platforms in the cloud. Some hype for force.com first :o) Ron talks about the collaboration between Google and Salesforce, bringing Google Apps into Salesforce. Salesforce use Google Apps internally, and also use an HR app internally. They want to track vacation requests in force.com and the calendar event in Google. Ron shows how when you change time off in the force.com platform, the change ripples through to the Google calendar. He then shows the Apex code used to create the integration.

Last of all is the Google Solutions marketplace, which allows you to advertise tools you have built that use Google apis.