Introduction to Google's Ajax APIs

This session was also useful for seeing the workflow of how Google teams develop web applications and realizing that we're all pretty much doing the same thing.

Google Ajax developers use any editor to create their applications, the only important thing for Google client side teams is to have a good debugger around - i.e. Firebug. I (still, I know) use Visual Studio's debugger but when you inject script into the DOM it can't find the script to debug sometimes and I can see myself moving over to Firebug.

This Google team's development is done by first building the static HTML files, then by building in the script required, and then adding in the Google APIs. HTML returned by the Google APIs is then styled using CSS classes documented on code.google.com.

Creating an iGoogle widget out of an HTML app is straightforward, you create an XML description file with its height etc and copy it to a google server. iGoogle will render the widget inside an iframe to avoid the possibility of it modifying any other widgets in its script.