Google creates platform to keep watch over APIs

By Alex Handy

November 5, 2010 — With just over a hundred tools and services for developers, Google has a lot to track. The company on Monday announced that users of eight of its APIs will now be able to keep track of their own usage more efficiently. Thanks to a rewritten back-end API platform, Google now offers usage tracking and monitoring for developers who build on top of Google's services.

The new monitoring system for API usage is only available on eight of Google's services: Google's translate, custom search, diacritice, prediction, Buzz, latitude, and its moderator API. These specific APIs were chosen because they are all built on the new platform developed internally at Google.

DeWitt Clinton, engineering manager at Google, said that many of the company's services will soon move to this new platform; he dubbed it the 2.0 API platform for Google's services. Developers who are building with these 2.0 APIs can now create an account and register their applications therein. From then on, the developer can log into Google's API site to see analytics and traffic for those APIs via a new console created by Google. It's like a view into the last mile for applications built on Google's services, enabling developers to see exactly what traffic Google's APIs are receiving from their applications.

“The new console gives developers and Google a closer connection,” said Clinton. “Developers have a single place they can go and manage their projects. It also gives Google a way to give back to those developers.”

Clinton went on to describe how the new analytics can be accessed by developers. “Say you are building something on our custom search API. What people often will do is activate the developer console, then write an application that runs on their own website. I will go and activate the custom search API, get a key, then write some JavaScript to access that and use that key on my site to allow my end users to access these services. The console would allow the developer to get analytics and statistics about how many people were making calls to the application."

Google's new API monitoring service is available now for free. The service can be found online at code.gooogle.com/apis/console, and Clinton hinted that Google will be moving all of its APIs there as they are upgraded.

Related Search Term(s): APIs, Google

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