an application that uses the power of Google's global computer network to make web pages load faster, local cache, prefetching, data compression. Currently a Google Labs product. (probably good for very slow connections and as a general proxy)
document analysis and OCR system, featuring pluggable layout analysis, pluggable character recognition, statistical natural language modeling, and multi-lingual capabilities. The OCRopus engine is based on two research projects: a high-performance handwriting recognizer developed in the mid-90's and deployed by the US Census bureau, and novel high-performance layout analysis methods. OCRopus is development is sponsored by Google and is initially intended for high-throughput, high-volume document conversion efforts.
The announcement this week that Google released a beta version of a robust cloud computing platform called Google App Engine that lets anyone build apps on Googles renowned and highly scalable infrastructure underscored a key trend in the software industry today. Namely that software platforms are moving from their traditional centricity around individually owned and managed computing resources and up into the cloud of the Internet. Googles entry into a space that has been largely dominated so far by Amazon and its Elastic Compute Cloud as well as a few smaller players like Bungee and Heroku has turned the Internet cloud computing space into a fully-fledged industry virtually overnight. What makes these offerings so interesting is their promise to turn enormous amounts of operational competency and accumulated economies of scale (which are enormous in Amazons and Googles cases) into a highly competitive new software platform, akin to Windows or Linux, except entirely hosted off-premises and on the Internet.
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
The VMforce collaboration is VMware’s first public implementation of Platform-as-a-Service (abbreviated as “PaaS”). PaaS offerings aim to make developers incredibly efficient by hiding many of the complexities that they face in typical enterprise IT environments such as:
* Waiting for the provisioning of physical machines and their software
* Changing your code to work with the specific middleware components your company uses
* Handling code modifications that may be required as the middleware versions change
* Dealing with new environments as your code moves from development to staging to production
* Frustrating interactions with the separate operations team when things aren’t working well
PaaS offerings typically offer add-on services available for developers to incorporate into their applications. These include capabilities such as location-based services, identity management, tweeting, chatter, search, and many forms of data storage. The developer efficiency and application richness to be gained through PaaS offerings is clear and we see it as one of the major trends in cloud computing. Today’s PaaS offerings are not without challenges though, and we believe VMware is in a unique position to attack these challenges and help bring PaaS to the mainstream.
GoogleCL brings Google services to the command line.
We currently support the following Google services:
* Blogger
$ google blogger post --title "foo" "command line posting"
* Calendar
$ google calendar add "Lunch with Jim at noon tomorrow"
* Contacts
$ google contacts list name,email > contacts.csv
* Docs
$ google docs edit --title "Shopping list"
* Picasa
$ google picasa create --title "Cat Photos" ~/photos/cats/*.jpg
* Youtube
$ google youtube post --category Education killer_robots.avi