Key Note (Andy's take) - Client Connectivity and the Cloud

KeyNote by Vic (9:15 am) - Client Connectivity and the Cloud
Hopefully I'll be able to augment some of the points that Karun already made. Vic . started the day off presenting the keynote for the day. Right off the bat he apologized for the absurdly long registration lines. In fact, the registration lines were still very long at 9:45, when the keynote should have started about 15 minutes earlier. Finally, they just let everyone into the conference without actually checking registration, the only request was that everyone stop by the registration desk by 2pm to actually register. The actual meat of Vic's presentation presented a cycle of computing throughout the years. The cycle contrasts computing power with computing accessibility. 40 years ago or so, the mainframe presented mass computing power (for its time), but was extremely inaccessible. Users had to wait in line for their allocated slice of computing time. Once they had that slice though, they had freedom to leverage the full power of the mainframe. As technology evolved, the personal computer was born. This reversed the trend by reducing the computing power available to users, but increasing the accesibility. Everyone had one in their home, but the raw horsepower paled in comparison (relatively) to the large mainframes. Finally, we arrive in today's computing world. Expensive data centers provide enormous computing power, but only a select few developers may actually have access to take advantage of it. It's not like Joe Developer can shell out a couple million dollars to build a data center for his website that can handle a five million visits a month. Vic's point of this whole story is that cloud computing enables Joe Developer to only worry about writing his killer app, and not need to have any concern about building the infrastructure. Cloud computing provides highly accessible enormous computing power.
After concluding this story, Vic introduced Allen Hurff of Myspace to present an example how MySpace recently leveraged Google Gears. Nothing too exciting here. MySpace basically improved some searching and sorting functionality within their message center using Google Gears. Comparing the old interface with the new, there was definitely some performance increases. More on Google Gears in a later post.
Vic comes back on stage and moves discussion into the mobile world. As we know, and Vic said, there is a ton of fragmentation on the mobile platform. This fragmentation is prevalent in both the web and rich client platforms. So many devices, and many of the difference devices have their own browser implementations. There are almost no standards, or atleast standards adopted on a widespread scale. Vic introduces Steve Horowitz to introduce Google's latest work in the mobile world, and whaddayaknow, Google Android! The biggest surprise of the demo was that he had an actual device (a brandless prototype) with Android running on it connected to a 3G network. It must have been some custom network that Google had setup, but still cool to see Android actually running on a device. His demo finished with a real wow moment. Showing the Google Street View running on Android, the development team had integrated the compass aspect of the GPS chip such that when he turned around (physically) the device detected his movement and rotated the street view with his turns. Really cool.
Vic back on stage to introduce Kevin Gibbs to present App Engine. App Engine is Google's cloud computing solution, and really the answer for developers to have access to the large Google data centers to run their applications. This way, devs can solely focus on writing the application without the headaches of configuring web servers and DBMSs. More details on App Engine in a future post, but it is worth mentioning that Kevin did break the news that AppEngine was finally publicly available today. Previousily, it was only available to a select few trial users.
And the keynote went on for a couple other presenters, nothing really to note. Mark Lucovsky overviewed the latest news regarding the GData and AJAX APIs. The GData API provides a method to read and write information from Google Services such as Google Docs. The AJAX APIs provides a read only interface into other Google Services such as YouTube. Following Mark, Bruce Johnson took the stage to overview the latest news from the Google Web Toolkit shop. Most notably, the GWT Release Candidate 1.5 is available today which includes support for Java 5 features. Pretty powerful stuff, just really a niche market and hard to see how GWT could fit into the enterprise. Finally, the last Googler to present at the keynote was David Glover. David highlighted the OpenSocial platform, Google's attempt to provide an application development platform. A developer can write an application according to the OpenSocial spec, and then the app is compatible to run on any social network that supports Open Social. It's a great idea, BUT, Facebook isn't on board at this point. We'll see how far this actually goes...
Vic back on stage to dismiss everyone to the first session (and remind people who didn't have a chance to register, to register by 2pm :).