Thursday, July 10, 2008

Don't forget about Google Browser Sync!

Google seems to be announcing quite a lot these last few days. I'm sure you're familiar with Lively, and you may know about some of the awesome developer tools (they even released the C++ style guide, for pete's sake.)

Something that will get lost in the shuffle among all this news is the open sourcing of Google Browser Sync. Google's not developing it any more, so hey, they put it out there to see if the world at large can do something useful with it. From the Google Open Source Blog:
While we're no longer doing active development, we've released the code in the hopes that those folks who asked for it will use it to develop something cool. For example, it would be great to see the server ported to Google App Engine, or support for Firefox 3 implemented.

You can check out the code using any Subversion client, and we have posted a short tutorial explaining how to build and run it.


More people are going to know that Google Browser Sync went away than those that will know the code has been made available, so doing it can't really undo much damage that might have come from criticism. It just smacks as a classy move by the small team responsible for Google Browser Sync, and also as a classy move by Google for having a culture that allows its engineers to open source its products.

Speaking of which, have you looked at protocol buffers?
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Note: My opinions. Not my employer's opinions. Even my cat would have different opinions, if I had a cat.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

That's too bad about Browser Sync. I've gotten great use out of it when setting up a new computer. Now I will have to keep Firefox 2 around so I can use the sync with it, and then upgrade it to FF3!

The coolest thing (IMO) about Protocol Buffers is that its an internally proven technology. I am a fan of GWT, but the biggest criticism I hear of it is that Google doesn't even use it for anything *important*. PayPal started using YUI a while back, and it was a big deal that Yahoo uses YUI all over the place.