This week we are hosting a lot of developers at Campus TLV. The goal of these talks is (mainly) to harness developers with knowledge and tools they can use today in their current jobs. We lucky to host developers from few government’s organizations. In their case, there are many special regulations that need to be accommodate, so we wish to give them practical tips/tools they can use in order to build open RESTFul APIs and modern web apps. It’s no secret that there is a lot of interesting data that only the government produce.
I hope that movements like codeforamerica.org will flourish around the world quickly.
Category Archives: webdev
Monitor Your Site With Apps Script
In this short tutorial we will see how to built an application that can be used as a (simple) Nagios but, without the need to set up a server and maintain a lot of code. It’s not a replacement to a ‘full’ monitoring systems that give you rich set of abilities but more ‘an idea’ to show you the power of Google cloud with Apps script. The main three components of our system will be:
- Google Spreadsheet – We will use two sheets. One to allow us to set configuration data like: urls to monitor, email to get notifications etc’. The other will be our ‘log’. We will write to it all the alerts so we could analyze them later.
- Google Form – This will be a quick and easy way to acknowledge that we are aware for the situation and we wish to mute the emails.
- Apps Script – All the logic for the checks, alerts and everything in between will be done with a short script with one trigger.
For the first two components, we will use a regular google sheet that looks similar to this: Continue reading
Chrome And HTML5 Updates
There are some very interesting technologies that are now available in Chrome. In this post I will try to cover some of them.
We know that Google started the Chrome project on the three ideas of speed, simplicity, and security. It’s still focusing on these important aspects while keep moving forward (fast) on implementation of many other HTML5 features. You can find Chrome on mobile, desktop, Chromebook and Chromecast. Let’s see what are the new, improved features we got these days as developers in Chrome platform:
Focus areas Chrome is moving forward
Mobile and Open Web Platform
We’re investing a lot of time to make sure mobile web experiences improve and that they are easier to develop!
- Build amazing mobile web apps
- WebGL, Web Audio, WebRTC, Web Speech and many more APIs that give you ‘native’ capabilities inside your browser.
- Vibration
- Device Motion
- WebRTC code lab (link) to check the new world of media (video/audio) in Chrome without plugins.
What’s New In Google Developers World
Google Cloud Platform Update
Yesterday we had a very cool event at Google’s offices. There were many mobile and web developers that came to hear what is new with Google cloud technologies (among other thing). I’ve used this set of slides because I knew they will be useful to many more developers that miss the event. That is the reason, I’ve used ‘a lot’ of words on each slide.
The event was recorded and I will update this post with the video soon. Have a great 2014! Continue reading
Big Query And Google Spreadsheet Integration
There are many options to extend the powerful spreadsheets that Google offers. One of the cool, new ways to leverage its power is by using a spreadsheet as your ‘front-end’ to a big data processing power (=Big Query). In our world, there is a need to get results as fast as possible and since our data sources grow fast. It’s nice to have a tool that let us ‘see’ (and share) results quickly and easily.
What is BigQuery?
Google BigQuery is a web service that lets you do interactive analysis of massive datasets. When we saying massive we are talking here on billions of rows (or more). It is a scalable and easy to use tool that gives developers and businesses an easy way into powerful data analytics on demand.
As for Google Docs and their powerful sharing capabilities – I guess we don’t need to elaborate here. So, let’s see what are the steps that will let us get data from BigQuery into our Google spreadsheet.
Integrate BigQuery To Google Spreadsheet Continue reading
Chrome DevTools Tips
A (good) web developer use several tools in order to be productive and built amazing projects. I guess, you can find advocates for Vim or Emacs but after you pass the phase of writing the code, it’s time to check why it’s not doing what you wish to see. You can find on Opera Dragonfly and in FireFox land there is Firebug. But, as you might guess already, my favorite tool is Chrome DevTools on Canary.
What are DevTools?
The Chrome Developer Tools are a set web authoring and debugging tools built into Google Chrome. The DevTools provide web developers deep access into the internals of the browser and their web application.
(!) If you are a front-end developer you should use Google Chrome Canary. It is easy to install it side by side your regular Chrome and it will give you the latest and greatest features with frequent improvements. This post is not a replacement to the one ‘source of true‘ but more of an update on the new features we have today (OCT 2013) in Canary. Checkout the pictures below with the green arrows that show you some of the interesting feature you can use. Continue reading
Google App Engine Intro
In this episode of Google Developer Live Israel I’ve covered in the first 6min how to work with Eclipse and Google plugin. This plugin is a great way to manage your app engine projects and to push your code to google cloud. The main goal of this video is to show developer how they can have a server up and running on Google App engine in few minutes. From 6:47 mark you can hear this explanations in hebrew… This part of the talk is tailored mainly for the developers/gamers that are coming to a hackathon event we have during this weekend around Hangout APIs. I am looking forward to see the cool games that will be built on this API…
Google Cloud And Mobile Web
Two talks in one day…
That’s what I did yesterday for Google Developer Group (GDG) Athens, Greece. It was a great opportunity to talk about the new cool aspects of google cloud platform (Yep, checkout things like: NodeJS on Compute Engine, App engine new support for technologies, Monte Carlo Simulations with App Script, Cloud storage, Big Query and many more). We talked for the first 25min on the new aspects of developing mobile web sites (and/or mobile web apps). In one word – go check out yeoman.io. Of course, there are many more aspects that are in the slides, so feel free to browse them and please let me know if I’ve missed something important that you are using in your mobile web project. Continue reading
Raspberry Pi And Google Coder #socool
The Web is awesome and this week I had the pleasure to play with a new ‘face’ of the web platform. It’s built for Raspberry Pi and you can take it as far as your imagination will let you.
Coder
Coder is a very cool project that aim to be a simple way to make web stuff on Raspberry Pi. Short and sweet. It is also an experiment for Raspberry Pi that give you a free piece of software that turns a Raspberry Pi into a simple, personal web server and web-based development environment. Basically, all that you need, for crafting HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. Plus, it’s an open-source project so you could fork it and learn from the source on http://googlecreativelab.github.io/coder/ Continue reading
Ido Green 