Piotr Woloszyn

I just got an invitation to try Google Mashup Editor (GME) which is a new AJAX development framework from Google with a web based IDE where you can edit, compile and test your mashups. In opposition to Yahoo Pipes the solution from Google doesn’t give you a slick visual editor where you can do any transformation of a RSS feed just by dragging and dropping. In this case you will have to type something. You don’t like it? I do. There is an example which displays an RSS feed:

<gm:page title="Mashup">

  <h1>Hello World!</h1>

  <gm:list id="diggFeed" data="http://www.digg.com/rss/index.xml" pagesize="10" template="diggTemplate"/>

  <gm:template id="diggTemplate">
    <table>
      <tr repeat="true">
        <td><gm:text ref="atom:title"/></td>
        <td><gm:text ref="digg:diggCount"/></td>
      </tr>
    </table>
  </gm:template>

</gm:page>

So, the editor accepts mixture of standard HTML, CSS, Javascript with Google Mashup tags. When you compile your application for testing and publishing, all the GME tags are transformed into JavaScript. An application can be tested in their sandbox. Ready application is hosted on Google servers and can be trivially transformed into iGoogle gadget. What is very interesting is an eventing model that allows you to emit events in one module that are handled in another module. It is fairly easy to create a map mashups and there is support for geo rss as well. To check what is possible to build using GME visit GME Mashup Gallery. There is also an official blog about GME. Niiiiiice!

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