Google Code is Google's site for developers interested in Google-related development. The site contains Open Source code and a list of their services which support public APIs.

APIs

Google offers a variety of APIs for web and desktop programmers alike. They are often based around current Google products, including AdSense, Google Checkout and Google Toolbar.

SOAP-based APIs

The AdSense and AdWords APIs, based on the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) data exchange standard, allow developers to integrate their own applications with these Google services. The AdSense API allows owners of web sites and blogs to manage AdSense sign-up, content and reporting, while the AdWords API gives AdWords customers programmatic access to their AdWords accounts and campaigns.

Google Data APIs

The Google Data APIs allow programmers to create applications that read and write data from Google services. Currently, these consist of APIs for Google Apps, Blogger, Google Base, Google Calendar, Google Code Search, Google Spreadsheets, Google Notebook, and Picasa Web Albums.

Open Source Projects

Google Projects and Patches are Open Source software that Google has developed.

Google Gears

Main article: Google Gears

Google Gears is beta software offered by Google to enable off-line access to services that normally only work on-line. It installs a database engine, based on SQLite, on the client system to locally cache the data. Google Gears-enabled pages use data from this local cache instead of from the online service. Using Google Gears, a web application may episodically synchronize the data in the local cache with the online service. If a network connection is not available, the synchronization is deferred until a network connection is established.ThereforeGoogle Gears enables web applications to work although access to the network service is not present.

Google Web Toolkit

Main article: Google Web Toolkit

The Google Web Toolkit is an open source toolkit allowing developers to create Ajax applications in the Java programming language . GWT supports rapid client/server development and debugging in any Java IDE. In a subsequent deployment step, the GWT compiler deciphers a working Java application into equivalent JavaScript that programmatically manipulates a web browser's HTML DOM using DHTML techniques. GWT emphasizes reusable, efficient solutions to recurring Ajax challenges, namely asynchronous remote procedure calls, history management, bookmarking, and cross-browser portability.

Summer of Code

Google Summer of Code is a mentoring program to find students for Open Source projects. In 2007, the program received nearly 6,200 applications.

Project Hosting

Google Code runs a project hosting service that provides revision control using Subversion (the repositories are implemented on top of Google's BigTable, but this is hidden to the user), an issue tracker, a wiki for documentation, and a file download feature. The service is available and free for all Open Source projects.

The site allows the projects to use only one of eight licenses (Apache, Artistic/GPLv2, BSD, GPLv2, GPLv3, LGPL, MIT, and MPL). The limitation is part of Google's stance against license proliferation.