I received an invitation to the Google Mashup Editor a couple of days ago. I haven’t had time to really play with it yet, but I wanted to give my initial impressions.
When I first heard about it, I was under the impression it would be similar to Yahoo Pipes. While the idea is similar — primarily, using feeds as data input for building web apps — the implementation is completely different. Where Yahoo Pipes is a visual app builder, Google Mashup Editor is a web-based IDE. It consists of a text editor, feed viewer, and a test environment.
The real meat of GME is the <gm:> tags. You can think of this as a templating language. The tags provide UI controls, data access, control structures, etc. You combine these with basic (X)HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build your mashup. When you run the application, the tags are “compiled” into standard JavaScript.
Now, here’s the $60,000 question: If the <gm:> tags are simply template tags that turn into JS, why didn’t Google just release it as a library? It seems like it would be simpler — and more useful — to let people download a Google Mashup Library than to build an entire IDE around it and restrict applications to only living on their servers. But maybe that’s coming later.
As I said, I haven’t had much time to play with it yet, but hopefully I will get something built with it soon to really test out what it can do.
2 Comments
#1
On June 7, 2007, Lev Epshteyn wrote:
You make a good point. The GME team here at Google has considered slitting the UI framework off as a reusable library, and we may yet do this in the future. However, the collection of tags and the JS code they generate is just the tip of the GME iceberg. There is a lot of infrastructure on the server that allows mashup developers to seamlessly do things like fetching remote feeds on the client without needing to worry about cross domain restrictions, authenticating users for the purposes of access control and private data storage, one-click deployment of applications on a scalable infrastructure, etc.
In fact one of the purposes of our initial limited roll out is to see how developers will chose to use the tools we have provided, so we can better serve the community in the future.
We encourage you to join our developer group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-mashup-editor to ask any questions and offer any feedback you may have - we will try to respond to all postings in a timely manner.
#2
On June 7, 2007, Billy wrote:
Lev, thanks for the info, you make some good points. Clearly, there's lots of things involved in a system like this that I didn't consider.
The release of the Public Calendar Directory has given me my first idea for a GME app. I think I'll have time in the next day or two to throw it together.