Google Docs developer team reports about adding the CSS support to to the Google Docs. Here's the small excerpt from the announce:

«Templates, Styles and Better Formatting have been among the most requested Google Docs features. Well, you asked and we listened!

So, as a first step we've enabled "Edit CSS" on Docs such that you can explore styling documents. Think of Docs as the platform and the world wide web your place to explore the different styles! The possibilities are endless!

Secondly, we've included some examples of CSS styles here to get you started. It's important to note that CSS is something that takes advanced knowledge and we don't recommend utilizing this functionality unless you're comfortable and familiar with it.

As we all know, this is a user help group, so please utilize this pages section to help one another out and to engage in CSS information sharing. We recommend you use outside sources to enhance your knowledge of CSS styles. A simple search for "CSS Examples" or "CSS Tutorials" is a good place to start.

The examples given below just scratch the surface of the style possibilities so I'm very excited to see the different styles you all create.»

Read more in Google Docs group.

Saurab Mathur writes about opening the sndbox for the iGoogle developers. Saurabh writes:

«Today, we're excited to open up a developer sandbox for iGoogle. The sandbox includes support for OpenSocial, a common API designed to let you easily build social applications that run on a growing number of web containers. The iGoogle OpenSocial container also supports canvas view, allowing developers to build powerful and feature-rich full-page applications for iGoogle's tens of millions of users.

The Google Data team has put some intresting video tutorials in the Google Data API blog. One of the members from this team Austin Chau writes:

«The first video focuses on the Google Calendar API. I go over how to get started using the JavaScript client library to interact with Google Calendar, and show a demo of the recently launched Interactive Developer Guide.

There is an intresting tutorial about creating a slick mashup with Google Charts, Ajax, and Project Zero posted on IBM developerWorks site by Dan Jamiolo. Here' short table of contents of this tutorial:

• Introduction: The Google Charts API

• Exposing a more RESTful charts API

• Designing a more helpful interface

Lot of new features was added to the Google Chart API. Here's the main enchancements:

• Easily create Sparklines (&cht=ls) without having to manipulate other kinds of graphs.

• Support for Radar charts (&cht=r or &cht=rs) to display data in a polar coordinate system.

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AJAX World Magazine published a very intresting article about using the Google AJAX feed API. This article provides a short review of Google AJAX feed API and covers the most of related topics like so:

• The AJAX Feed API's Architecture at a Glance.

• Using the AJAX Feed API.

• Extending the HelloWorld Example - Displaying Multiple Feeds.

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The latest release of the Google Data Python client library (1.0.10) contains quite a few new features and support for two previously unsupported Google Data APIs (photos and codesearch). Some of the other notable features in this release include:

There is a intresting asrticle about libraries for working with data collection on devX.com site. The author Narayanan A.R. Comparing two libraries for working with data collection , Google Collection Library an Apache Commons Collections. Here the topics covered in this article:

• The com.google.common.base Package

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Slide Show Control now available as a Google Gadget

The Google AJAX Feed API's Slide Show Control is now available as a Google Gadget that can be added to your iGoogle homepage.

Google has introduced a new Javascript Feed API which will allow developers to make client-side calls to feeds therefore avoiding dealing with complex server-side proxies. Almost all feeds are supported (Atom 1.0, Atom 0.3, RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, RSS 0.94, RSS 0.93, RSS 0.92, RSS 0.91, RSS 0.9) although at present the API does not allow access to feeds which require passwords or authentication.

The first open source release of the Google Web Toolkit has been announced.

Version 1.3 is the first to be released with the new open process:

Our open source charter, ???Making GWT Better,??? explained that GWT development would take place in the open, and that we??Td even publish our engineering meeting notes. We??Tre happy to report that it??Ts working out really well. We??Tve had many fruitful discussions on the contributors forum, and we??Tve already received and accepted some patches that will make it into the next version of GWT.

As part of the open process you can dip into the development plan for 1.4 which includes items such as:

The new version of the .NET client library is already released, including binaries, to the subversion depot, and will appear as a binary download shortly. Beside several bugfixes, this new release includes support for Google Spreadsheets, the latest Google property to release a GData API. Tell us what you think.

Interactive session from MySQL Camp I:

Specific Query Performance Tips (see also database design tips for tips on indexes):

1. Use EXPLAIN to profile the query execution plan
2. Use Slow Query Log (always have it on!)
3. Don't use DISTINCT when you have or could use GROUP BY
4. Insert performance
   1. Batch INSERT and REPLACE
   2. Use LOAD DATA instead of INSERT
5. LIMIT m,n may not be as fast as it sounds
6. Don't use ORDER BY RAND() if you have > ~2K records
7. Use SQL_NO_CACHE when you are SELECTing frequently updated data or large sets of data
8. avoid wildcards at the start of LIKE queries
9. avoid correlated subqueries and in select and where clause (try to avoid in)
10. no calculated comparisons -- isolate indexed columns
11. ORDER BY and LIMIT work best with equalities and covered indexes
12. separate text/blobs from metadata, don't put text/blobs in results if you don't need them
13. derived tables (subqueries in the FROM clause) can be useful for retrieving BLOBs w/out sorting them. (self-join can speed up a query if 1st part finds the IDs and use it to fetch the rest)
14. ALTER TABLE...ORDER BY can take data sorted chronologically and re-order it by a different field -- this can make queries on that field run faster (maybe this goes in indexing?)
15. Know when to split a complex query and join smaller ones
16. Delete small amounts at a time if you can
17. make similar queries consistent so cache is used
18. Have good SQL query standards
19. Don't use deprecated features
20. Turning OR on multiple index fields (<5.0) into UNION may speed things up (with LIMIT), after 5.0 the index_merge should pick stuff up.
21. Don't use COUNT * on Innodb tables for every search, do it a few times and/or summary tables, or if you need it for the total # of rows, use SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS and SELECT FOUND_ROWS()
22. Use INSERT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY update (INSERT IGNORE) to avoid having to SELECT
23. use groupwise maximum instead of subqueries

Scaling Performance Tips:

Calendars and blogs have all been done and embraced by the data feed developer community, but in Google's on-going attempt to push the envelope, here is the next installment for GData.

For those of you who have been trying to build client-side GData mashups but have been thwarted by the same-origin policy, we have some good news for you: you can now get public Base, Blogger, and Calendar feeds as JSON! This means that you can start displaying GData in your web page with a little JavaScript.

Let's take a look at how this works -- start out by opening this URL in your browser (this is the GData feed for the Google Doodle calendar):

http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/
c4o4i7m2lbamc4k26sc2vokh5g%40group.calendar.google.com/public/full
?orderby=starttime&alt=json-in-script&callback=handleJson

You should see something like this:
handleJson({"version": "1.0","encoding": "UTF-8","feed"...});

What you are looking at is a JavaScript function named handleJson() that is being applied to a big JavaScript object. This object has a hierarchical structure that parallels that of the Atom representation of the feed (you can also read about the details on how the XML to JSON mapping works).