I recently signed up for Google Mashups beta. When they asked me to sign up for beta, I didn’t really expecting hearing back from them anytime soon, but to my surprise they activated my account for beta in a matter of couple of days! I have been playing around with Yahoo pipes and such, so couldn’t wait to try out Google mashups.

First impressions

I looked through the sample applications that Google Mashups comes with. The samples include simple mashups like extracting/showing feeds and some relatively complex ones illustrating integration with maps and creating few useful mashups/widgets. There are also a bunch of published mashups that you can browse through here.

The mashups editor has 3 tabs:

• Editor: This is where you write the mashup code
• Feed Browser: Utility for browsing the feed that you may use in your mashup
• Sandbox: Provides the feature to test your mashup

Writing a Simple mashup

It was easy to get a simple mashup to work - I was able to combine a couple of feeds and get the output in a no-so-bad looking UI with option to sort by columns in a few minutes. I am yet to try any complex stuff - I will post an example in the next few days.

The mashup editor let’s you put a bunch of html, javascript, css and GME tags within <gm:page> and </gm:page>. The mashup code written in the editor is compiled into javascript before being shown to the user. The fact that you can write your own javascript, css etc means it’s possible to completely customize the UI!

GME also supports event emission/handling for the UI components, so one UI component can listen to the events generated by another component and repaint itself!

GME also has a javascript api that can be used to get better handle on DOM and the individual UI components/data.

Overall it provides enough tools to be able to create rich UI based on data/feeds from google or anywhere else on the web. The mashup tools are sure hot these days, and with Google joining other players like Yahoo pipes, Microsoft popfly, it sure is going to remain hot in months, even years to come!

Useful Links/Resources:

GME Getting started guide

Google Mashups Editor & Yahoo Pipes

When I first heard about GME, I was expecting something along the lines of Yahoo Pipes and PopFly - with rich UI based creation of mashups. GME is nothing like that - in fact you need to write code using xml/html/css etc. So does that mean Yahoo Pipe is better than GME? I have seen a few articles/blogs where people are comparing GME to Yahoo Pipes in that sense. But before we get into that debate, let’s think over this -

Are both GME and Yahoo Pipes competing against each other to achieve the same goal?

Before I had a good look at GME, I would have answered yes, but now I think these two products complement each other, not compete against each other! Here is how.

Yahoo Pipes is great at getting a bunch of data sources and creating one consolidated, customized feed. It is very flexible at creating customized URLS, locations etc and using them as inputs to create rich feed, but it’s not great at creating UI showing that data in a customized fashion. This is where Google Mashups editor comes in! It can use feeds created by Yahoo Pipes and build rich UI to show that data.

For developer community, Yahoo pipes combined with Google Mashups Editor forms a potent combination for building rich UI to show rich data - and that’s great news!

Overall, I think Google Mashups Editor is a powerful platform and it’s here to stay! I will soon post a mashup with GME - possibly using Yahoo Pipes as data source. Update: I recently posted an example using Yahoo Pipes and GME here.