Archive for December, 2009

Earlier tonight, we wrapped up a very exciting Campfire One at which we announced that GWT 2.0 is now officially available. In addition to major improvements in the GWT SDK and the Google Plugin for Eclipse, GWT 2.0 includes a brand new performance analysis tool for Chrome called Speed Tracer.

Introducing Speed Tracer

We hinted at it a few weeks ago, and now it's available: Speed Tracer is a powerful new performance analysis tool for Chrome that gives you unprecedented insight into the inner workings of any web application — not just those created with GWT. Want to know why your web app feels sluggish? Speed Tracer can help you find the answer.

It's fun to see Speed Tracer in action, so here's a quick introductory video...

As an aside, Speed Tracer has a pretty snazzy user interface, eh? It was built with GWT.

Faster development, faster apps

Here's another quick overview video that highlights some of the cool new features in GWT 2.0...

Now let's talk in more detail about what's new in the GWT SDK and the Google Plugin for Eclipse...

Fast edit/refresh with new development mode and draft compiles

• GWT 2.0 greatly improves the edit/refresh cycle by introducing a new method of debugging called development mode that allows you to debug your project with the browser of your choice — yes, your browser, not one dictated by GWT. Development mode relies on a new browser plugin, called the GWT Developer Plugin, that makes it possible for your Java project to create a debugging bridge to any browser into which it is installed. Technical details aside, this new way of debugging really just feels right.
• By moving your debugging experience directly into the browser, development mode makes it possible to use each browser's own unique development tools in combination with Java debugging. That's right, you can now debug your Java source code in Firefox while simultaneously using great tools like Firebug to view DOM structures and experiment with CSS. Ditto for Safari and Inspector, and so on for other browsers.
• The new Google Plugin for Eclipse includes streamlined support for launching and controlling development mode, including a new view that embeds development mode logging messages directly as an Eclipse view. It's also possible to launch development mode manually, which utilizes a Swing-based user interface and can work completely outside the context of Eclipse, including in IDEs other than Eclipse.
• Development mode also supports multi-browser debugging, meaning that you can connect to more than one type of browser from a single debugging session. This dovetails especially well with the ability to leave a development mode session running for an extended period of time, allowing you to simply refresh the browser to see the results of changes to your Java source. It's a great way to quickly ensure that your project works properly across all the major browsers without needing to restart the Java debugger.
• And, finally, development mode works across a network. Why is that cool? Because you can easily test browsers on operating systems different than the one on which you're developing. For example, suppose you are developing in an IDE on Linux. You can, in a single debugging session, connect across the network to see your app running — and debug it — in Internet Explorer on Windows as well as Safari on OS X. Or Chrome on Windows. Or Firefox on OS X. The point is that you can develop using whichever platform you prefer while still debugging on each of the browser/OS combinations that your users may have.
• If you do need to compile to JavaScript often — though hopefully development mode will dramatically reduce your need to do so — you can use the GWT compiler's new -draftCompile flag, which speeds up compiles by skipping optimizations. To be clear, you definitely shouldn't deploy JavaScript compiled that way, but it can be a time saver during non-production continuous builds.

Declarative UI with UiBinder

• GWT 2.0 introduces a powerfully productive new way to construct user interface code called UiBinder. UiBinder makes it easy to separate the visual aspects of the UI from its associated application logic. To construct your UI, simply mix HTML and widget elements declaratively in a UiBinder XML template — a .ui.xml file. You can then place application logic in an associated .java file.
• UiBinder makes it much easier to involve web designers more directly into the development workflow. For example, developers can copy/paste from HTML mocks provided by a web designer. We've also seen that some web designers like to edit UiBinder XML templates directly and use development mode's fast edit/refresh cycle as they experiment with the UI design. It's a lot more fun to design using interactive widgets rather than passive HTML mocks.
• It isn't as if there's a canned set of widgets that can be used with UiBinder, by the way. Incorporating your own custom widgets into a UiBinder template is exactly the same as using any of the built-in widgets.
• UiBinder also helps prevent subtle bugs, such typos in IDs, from making it into production by validating all cross-references between the .ui.xml and .java files at compile-time.
• The Google Plugin for Eclipse now provides UiBinder-aware wizards, code completion, red squigglies, and refactoring to help you use UiBinder effectively.

Pixel-perfect visuals with layout panels

• Getting the exact look and feel you want in your UI is something that has traditionally been tricky with HTML and CSS. Prior to GWT 2.0, even GWT's widgets were not able to fully abstract away some of the layout headaches that can occur. However, GWT 2.0 introduces layout panels that actually do make it possible to reliably create the layout you want. The Mail sample application in the GWT SDK has been updated to show you how this works.
• Layout panels create a predictable constraint-based layout system on top of standard CSS. Because it works with CSS, rather than in spite of it, layout panels continue to work predictably in the presence of custom CSS styles that you might need to include. And because CSS-based layout is handled natively inside the browser's rendering engine, no JavaScript needs to run during layout. As a result, layout is fast and fluid — you can especially notice the speed when resizing the browser window.
• As you'd expect, layout panels work especially well with UiBinder. With only a few lines of XML, you can create really sophisticated layouts, including animated transitions, splitters, and more.

Compiler improvements

• A key new feature in GWT 2.0 is developer-guided code splitting. It's easiest to explain with an analogy: when you're watching a movie online, you definitely don't want to download the whole thing before it starts playing, right? You want the movie to start instantly, and the rest should download incrementally. The same is true for web applications. Starting a web apps shouldn't feel like you're installing something; it should just start instantly when you click on a hyperlink. Code splitting is a very high-leverage tool to help you achieve exactly that.
• It may sound complicated, but code splitting is actually easy. Just find a spot in your project where you'd like to chop out some code and use the magic new GWT.runAsync() method to create a split point. By continuing to add split points wherever it makes sense, you can easily and safely slice and dice your application to ensure that the initial download includes only the bare minimum of code necessary to start. The compiler automatically arranges for additional code fragments to be downloaded later. And, unlike manually splitting JavaScript across <script> files by hand, the GWT compiler does the hard work of ensuring that all necessary dependencies are downloaded in the correct order automatically. For an example, see the Showcase sample application included in the GWT SDK, which has been updated to demonstrate code splitting.
• In addition to code splitting, there are also fundamental improvements to the compiler's ability to produce JavaScript. With each new release of GWT, we add compiler optimizations to make compiled JavaScript smaller and faster. That's a big benefit if you have existing GWT projects, because you can simply upgrade, recompile, and — poof — your applications start and run more quickly. Indeed, GWT 2.0 includes some high-impact new optimizations, and we have already seen size reductions in compressed JavaScript ranging from 3% up to over 20%.

Optimized resources with ClientBundle

• ClientBundle extends and generalizes the resource-bundling pattern that began with ImageBundle in GWT 1.4. With a simple interface declaration, you can at compile-time optimize and embed resources directly into your compiled JavaScript. For example, by bundling images, you can avoid costly HTTP round-trips. ClientBundle supports bundling a wide variety of resource types, including images, text, and even CSS.
• You heard that right, CSS. CssResource is a powerful new framework for managing styles. It supports a new extended CSS syntax for defining sprites, named constants, scopes, conditional selectors, and more. It also aggressively optimizes your CSS by stripping comments and whitespace and by obfuscating class names.
• ClientBundle is also extensible. You can create your own resource types and hook into the ClientBundle framework to keep resource interfaces coherent and succinct while bundling any sort of resource you can find a use for.

Special Thanks

GWT 2.0 is the culmination of many months of collaborative development, and on behalf of the the entire GWT team, we'd like to thank the WebKit team, with whom we've worked closely to add the low-level instrumentation necessary to make Speed Tracer possible.

And, as always, a huge thanks goes out to the GWT developer community, many of whom have bravely followed the tip of the GWT trunk in svn, trying out new in-progress features and helping find bugs — and even submitting patches to fix them.

Get Started

Believe it or not, we've still only scratched the surface of what's new. As always, GWT is open source and free to use. We hope you'll give GWT 2.0 a spin.

Download Google Web Toolkit 2.0

Happy coding! See you online.

The IE Cumulative Security Update for December 2009 is now available via Windows Update or Microsoft Update.

This security update resolves four privately reported vulnerabilities and one publicly disclosed vulnerability in Internet Explorer.  The security update addresses these vulnerabilities by correcting the control and by modifying the way that Internet Explorer handles objects in memory.  For detailed information on the contents of this update, please see the following documentation:

• Microsoft Security Bulletin MS09-072
• Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 976325

This security update is rated Critical for all supported releases of Internet Explorer: Internet Explorer 5.01, Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1, Internet Explorer 7 (except when running on supported editions of Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008), and Internet Explorer 8 (except when running on supported editions of Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008 R2). For Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 running on Windows servers as listed, this update is rated Moderate.

IE security updates are cumulative and contain all previously released updates for each version of Internet Explorer.

I encourage everybody to download this security update and other non-IE security updates via Windows Update or Microsoft Update. Windows users are also strongly encouraged to configure their systems for automatic updates to keep their systems current with the latest updates from Microsoft.

Billy Rios
Program Manager
Internet Explorer Security

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

The Google Chrome team is launching beta support for extensions today, and we thought we'd take a shot at writing a Reader extension. The Google Reader Notifier displays the number of unread items in your Reader account in Google Chrome's toolbar. When clicked, the toolbar icon displays a popup preview of the latest items in your account. This way, you can keep an eye on your Reader account wherever on the web you are.

Let us know how you like the extension (and what other features you'd like to see in it) by adding a review on its page in the extension gallery.

Note that extensions are currently available only for the beta channel of Google Chrome for Windows and Linux, so you'll want to make sure you're running one of those browsers before you install the extension.

Reader users may want to try the RSS subscription extension too. It adds previewing and one-click subscribe support for any RSS or Atom feed that you happen to come across. And feel free to browse or search for other handy extensions.

And if you're a developer itching to write your own extension, you'll want to check out the extensive documentation and code samples.

Posted by Hartmut Neven, Technical Lead Manager Image Recognition

Many Google services we offer depend on sophisticated artificial intelligence technologies such as machine learning or pattern recognition. If one takes a closer look at such capabilities one realizes that they often require the solution of what mathematicians call hard combinatorial optimization problems. It turns out that solving the hardest of such problems requires server farms so large that they can never be built.

A new type of machine, a so-called quantum computer, can help here. Quantum computers take advantage of the laws of quantum physics to provide new computational capabilities. While quantum mechanics has been foundational to the theories of physics for about a hundred years the picture of reality it paints remains enigmatic. This is largely because at the scale of our every day experience quantum effects are vanishingly small and can usually not be observed directly. Consequently, quantum computers astonish us with their abilities. Let’s take unstructured search as an example. Assume I hide a ball in a cabinet with a million drawers. How many drawers do you have to open to find the ball? Sometimes you may get lucky and find the ball in the first few drawers but at other times you have to inspect almost all of them. So on average it will take you 500,000 peeks to find the ball. Now a quantum computer can perform such a search looking only into 1000 drawers. This mind boggling feat is known as Grover’s algorithm.

Over the past three years a team at Google has studied how problems such as recognizing an object in an image or learning to make an optimal decision based on example data can be made amenable to solution by quantum algorithms. The algorithms we employ are the quantum adiabatic algorithms discovered by Edward Farhi and collaborators at MIT. These algorithms promise to find higher quality solutions for optimization problems than obtainable with classical solvers.

On the hardware side we are collaborating with D-Wave in Vancouver, Canada. D-Wave develops processors that realize the adiabatic quantum algorithm by magnetically coupling superconducting loops called rf-squid flux qubits. This design realizes what is known as the Ising model which represents the simplest model for an interacting many-body system and it can be manufactured using proven chip fabrication methods. Unfortunately, it is not easy to demonstrate that a multi-qubit system such as the D-Wave chip indeed exhibits the desired quantum behavior and experimental physicists from various institutions are still in the process of characterizing the chip.



Today, at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference (NIPS 2009), we show the progress we have made. We demonstrate a detector that has learned to spot cars by looking at example pictures. It was trained with adiabatic quantum optimization using a D-Wave C4 Chimera chip. There are still many open questions but in our experiments we observed that this detector performs better than those we had trained using classical solvers running on the computers we have in our data centers today. Besides progress in engineering synthetic intelligence we hope that improved mastery of quantum computing will also increase our appreciation for the structure of reality as described by the laws of quantum physics.

The theory paper on which the demonstration is based can be found on the arXiv and a report describing the details of the implementation is here.

Posted by Alfred Spector, VP Research and Special Initiatives and Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations

[cross-posted with the Official Google Blog]

Today kicks off the nation’s first Computer Science Education Week. The goal of this week is to encourage students to learn about the discipline that powers the computers, applications and technology they use everyday. Computer Science Education Week emphasizes that our society's aspirations will be met by individuals who have an increasingly deep understanding of computer technology.

We've been thinking about ways that Google could help with computer science education for several years. After all, our search engine has been used in education since its inception — how many essays, research papers and theses begin with a Google search? Today, we'd like to summarize some of what we've been doing at Google to advance CS education. Our efforts focus on four strategic areas, with an emphasis on computing in core curriculum.

Use of Google tools to support teaching and learning
Having a web-based shared document, spreadsheet or presentation that students in a group or class can all view and edit online has had an enormous impact on collaboration in education. So we provide a free suite of our communication & collaboration applications designed especially for schools and universities. We also used our tools and infrastructure to build and support a community of teachers who have developed classroom content and activities around these applications.

Increasing the access to and quality of Computer Science curriculum
We have many people at Google who know about all areas of computer science, many with backgrounds and experience in education. With this deep base of computer science knowledge, we developed Google Code University to help faculty update their undergraduate computer science curriculum, and the Summer of Code, which gives students the opportunity to develop programs for various open source software projects.

Integrating computing curriculum across K-12 core subjects
A group of Google engineers and K-12 "teaching fellows" is working on building and testing models of curriculum to encourage innovation. These curriculum models revolve around "computational thinking", a problem-solving technique that draws on the thinking and analysis skills that computer scientists use everyday. Our goal is to integrate computational thinking across subject areas in K-12 by connecting these skills, which are already a part of core curriculum, more explicitly to computer science. We're also taking this a step further by integrating simple programming concepts in appropriate areas of core K-12 curriculum, such as algebra. Our hope is that by making computer science more visible and showing its connection to every subject area, students will experience the full power and utility of technology in areas of interest to them. Integrating CS into other subjects will also have the key added benefit of leveling the playing field, so that many more students will have the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of computing.

Supporting organizations and individuals through community outreach
We've also worked for years with teachers and nonprofits to build early interest in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields. Besides providing financial support and sponsorship for many external organizations, we've developed a number of scholarship and intern programs to increase the number of women and underrepresented minorities in STEM and computer science. In addition to these formal programs, every day Googlers all over the world organize visits with students at nearby schools and community centers to teach, present workshops and tech talks, and to share their personal stories on how they became computer scientists and engineers.

We're absolutely delighted to be a co-sponsor of the first Computer Science Education Week. As a company, we've benefited so much from advances in computer science and the creativity of computer scientists. We also know that the next great innovators in computer science are out there, ready to be inspired to create technologies that change our world and benefit our society. We urge our children, parents, teachers and educational institutions to pay more attention to this critical field, and we will continue to do our share.

Title: Web Developer Reports to:VP of Engineering Job Description Snap is seeking a highly intelligent, innovative, web developer to join its engineering team and work on designing and implementing different components on the Snap.com website. This person will be assigned the development of order management, statistics reporting system, and other components on the web site using PHP [...]

Posted by Hanah Kim, University Programs

[cross-posted with the Google Student Blog]

As part of Google’s ongoing commitment to encouraging students of underrepresented backgrounds in technology to pursue graduate study, we are pleased to host the first annual 2010 Google Graduate Researchers in Academia of Diverse backgrounds (GRAD) CS Forum. This forum will bring together students who are historically underrepresented in the field to connect with one another and with Google.

Up to 75 computer scientists will be invited to an all-expenses paid forum that will run Thursday evening through Saturday afternoon on January 21–23 at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, CA.

The Google GRAD CS Forum will include technical talks from established researchers – both from Google and universities – and a unique occasion to build and strengthen networks with other emerging researchers. Students will also enjoy tours of the Googleplex, have the opportunity to meet with Google engineers in their focus areas, and have fun exploring the San Francisco Bay Area.

Eligibility Requirements

Applicants must:

• be a computer science (or related technical discipline) graduate student currently enrolled in a Masters or PhD program at a university in North America
• demonstrate academic excellence and leadership in the computing field
• maintain a cumulative GPA of at least 3.3 on a 4.0 scale or 4.3 on a 5.0 scale or equivalent in their current program

The forum is open to all qualified graduate students, and is committed to addressing diversity in our company and in the technology industry. Students who are a member of a group that is historically under-represented in the technology industry are encouraged to apply, including female, Native American, African American and Hispanic students as well as students with disabilities.

Selection Process

Google engineers will select up to 75 attendees based on each applicant’s academic and technical achievements. Evidence of academic achievement and leadership experience should be evident from the resume.

How to Apply

Complete the online application and submit all required documents online. First-time users will be required to register and create an account. Please note that recommendation letters are not required.

Application Deadline: December 12, 2009

Apply now at www.google.com/jobs/students/gradforum.

Note: letters of recommendation are not required

Posted by Christopher Alberti and Michiel Bacchiani, Google Research

On November 19, we launched our new automatic captioning and automatic alignment feature for YouTube. These features significantly reduce the effort it takes to create captions for videos on YouTube.

With YouTube expanding its index at a breakneck speed of about 20 hours of new material uploaded each minute, access to this vast body of video material becomes increasingly challenging. This is particularly true for people with hearing disabilities. A 2005 US census showed that 7.8 million people (or about 3 percent of the US population) have difficulty hearing a normal conversation, with 1 million unable to hear at all. Hence, increased accesibility by adding captions to YouTube videos makes the corpus available to a much larger audience.

In addition to expanded accessibility for those with hearing disabilities, the combination of captions with machine translation expands YouTube accessibility across the globe. If a caption track is available, it can be translated automatically in any of the 51 currently available languages. As a result, video content otherwise not accessible due to a language barrier can now be understood by a significantly larger user population.

Although captions are available in YouTube for hundreds of thousands of videos, it remains only a fraction of the the available corpus. Furthermore, only a tiny fraction of the avalanche of new video material getting uploaded is captioned. One reason for this lack of coverage is the effort it takes for a video uploader to generate captions. And this is where our new auto captioning and auto alignment features can benefit our uploaders. Auto-captioning uses automatic speech recognition technology to produce machine generated captions. Auto-alignment requires only a transcript--the uploader no longer has to sync that text with the video stream. To more concisely illustrate the use of these features, check out our help center article or this short video:



Modern-day speech recognition systems are big statistical machines trained on large sets of data. They do the best job recognizing speech in domains similar to their training data. Both the auto captioning and the auto alignment features use the speech recognition infrastructure that underlies Google Voice and Voice Search, but trained on different data. As an intial installment, for YouTube we use models trained on publicly available English broadcast news data. As a result, for now, the new features only work well on English material that is similar in style (i.e. an individual speaker who is speaking clearly).

The auto alignment features is available for all new video uploads, however the scope is limited to English material. The auto captioning feature is initially rolled out to a set of educational partners only. Although this is very limited in scope, the early launch makes the results of the system available to the viewers of this material instantly and it allows us to gauge early feedback which can aid in improving the features. We will release automatic captions more widely as quickly as possible.

Over time, we will work on improving the quality as well as the coverage of these features. Expansion will take place along two axes: additional languages will be made available and within each language we will cover much broader domains (beyond just broadcast news-like material). Since the content available in YouTube is so varied, it is difficult to set a timeline for this expansion. Automatic speech recognition remains challenging, in particular for the varied types of speech and background sounds and noise we see in the YouTube corpus. Therefore, to reach a high level of quality, we need to make advances in core technology. Although this will take time, we are committed to making that happen and to providing the larger community with the benefits of those developments.