AJAX APIs Blog

When we introduced this blog over four years ago, the term AJAX was only a year old, and Google had exactly one relevant API . Ajax has since become a mainstream part of the Web, and our family of APIs has grown. Like many growing families, we’ve accumulated a lot of cruft over the years, and have outgrown our first home. Time for some housekeeping.

API Documentation - Now easier to find and use
We’ve reorganized our documentation to make it easier to find what you’re looking for, based on what you want to do. We used to group our APIs based on technology - for instance, there were Google Data APIs and AJAX APIs. Now, you’ll see that each API has been given its own place, including its own documentation pages. This new documentation has been created from the ground up to provide a better experience for people coding against the APIs. We’ve also organized these more logically by product, such as moving the Book Search API into the Books family of APIs, and added many more samples to help you get started.

A fond farewell
In the spirit of consolidation, we’ll be retiring this blog in favor of the Google Code Blog. By concentrating on fewer blogs, we’ll be able to keep the blog fresher and help make sure that as wide an audience as possible is able to benefit from our posts. We’ll continue using tags, so that you can subscribe to your favorite APIs and focus on the content that most interests you (though we hope you’ll check in occasionally to see what new stuff you might be missing).

Show your support for the Code blog by hopping over to read about the new Google APIs console and Custom Search API, and also say good-bye to the Web and Local Search APIs, which are being deprecated. Full post here.

Posted by: Adam Feldman, Product Manager

Earlier this year, we launched the Tashkeel (Diacritization) service on Google Labs. I'm pleased to announce that we've added an experimental Diacritization component to the Google Language API. This is a simple JSON API which you can use to add diacritic symbols to strings of Arabic text.

To test it out, try clicking this link:
https://www.googleapis.com/language/diacritize/v1?lang=ar&message=مرحبا%20العالم&last_letter=false&callback=result

A URL-encoded string is supplied as the message parameter, and it's returned by the API with diacritics included. These symbols are useful to people just learning the language and as an important pre-step for several text processing applications.

Right now, the API only supports Arabic, but we're working on adding more languages, as well as a JavaScript API, so be sure to watch this blog for details. For more information, see the documentation and our post on the Google Arabia blog (you may want to click "view post in English").

We're excited to announce the addition of 6 new languages (Greek, Russian, Serbian, Sanskrit, Amharic, Tigrinya) to the Transliteration API. Using Google Transliteration you can convert Roman characters to their phonetic equivalent in your language. Note that this is not the same as translation — it's the sound of the words that are converted from one alphabet to the other.

Transliteration API allows this functionality to be available to all websites, which will make it easier for you to add transliteration capabilities to textfields on your webpages. Using this customizable API, you can enable users of your website to type 19 languages. For more information, please take a look at the documentation and samples at our code playground. If you're looking for a finer level of control on your web pages, also check out the low-level interface to transliteration, and the font rendering support APIs.

Google Transliteration is integrated into several Google properties and we have bookmarklets in addition to API to extend this capability to other websites. Please try these out and let us know what you think and how you're using it.

Posted by: Kuntal Loya and Ajay Somani, Software Engineers

The language APIs keep right on trucking, released recently are a handful of new translation languages, pairs, and keyboard layouts.

We've added the ability to use machine translation to or from the following languages:

• Afrikaans
• Belarusian
• Icelandic
• Irish
• Macedonian
• Malay
• Persian
• Swahili
• Welsh
• Yiddish

With the addition of the above the total count for language pair combination comes to a mind boggling 2550 pairs. In addition, we find the above additions exciting because, for the first time, African languages are available through the API and we now support all 23 Official European Union languages.

A few months ago we announce our virtual keyboard API and this month we've added nine new keyboard layouts:

• Bulgarian
• Czech
• Greek
• Hebrew
• Hungarian - 101 layout
• Slovak
• Slovenian
• Turkish - Q layout
• Ukrainian - 101 layout

Here's a simple example of using the Slovak keyboard layout.

We enjoy featuring real-world applications that show how versatile the AJAX APIs can be. Below we're highlighting two very different apps and the developers who built them:

AroundMe
AroundMe is an iPhone application where the AJAX APIs are central to the user experience. Specifically, the app utilizes the Local Search API to enable users to find information about their surroundings. In the videos below, Marco Pifferi (the developer behind AroundMe) gives a demo of his app, his thoughts on using the AJAX APIs, and tips for integrating them in mobile apps.



Mibbit
Mibbit is a web-based chat application that uses the AJAX APIs to enhance the chat experience. The language APIs help users to translate their messages into a number of different languages. Mibbit also uses the Maps API and YouTube API to display embedded maps or YouTube videos if a user includes a Maps or YouTube URL in their chat. Jimmy Moore, creator of Mibbit, walks through Mibbit in his video below.



Do you have a great app that uses the AJAX APIs? Submit a video about it and we may feature it on this blog. Questions? Stop by our support forum or IRC channel.

It is often difficult for Internet users to input text in many non-Latin script-based languages for a variety of reasons. The correct keyboard layout may not be installed on the computer they're using - sometimes such a layout may not be well developed or widely available. This poses a challenging problem for web developers because there is no way they can ensure that their users have access to this very basic input technology. Our Transliteration API can help, but requires that the user know multiple languages.

Right on the heels of introducing support for translating Persian (Farsi), we've added a new Virtual Keyboard API into the Google AJAX Language API to further assist with text input. With this, developers can help their users input text without relying on the right software being installed on the computer they happen to be using.

It couldn't be easier to get this on your page. Simply load the right package:

google.load("elements", "1", {
 packages: "keyboard"
});

Then create a keyboard, specifying the keyboard layout and text field to bind to:

var kbd = new google.elements.keyboard.Keyboard(
 [google.elements.keyboard.LayoutCode.Arabic],
 ['myTextArea']);

And here's what it looks like:

This gives you the control to provide a better user experience, even for multilingual websites. By creating multiple keyboards with different layouts, each text field can be bound to the appropriate keyboard - and the user will see only the keyboard attached to whichever text field has the focus.

But don't take my word for it - check out a sample for yourself. Notice that in addition to allowing users to click on the virtual keyboard, it also temporarily transforms the key assignments on their physical keyboard, allowing rapid typing for those users accustomed to a given layout.

With this initial release, we are launching 5 language layouts. They are:

We plan to roll out support for more keyboard layouts in the future. But in the meantime, read through the class reference and see the rest of the Code Playground samples.

After you've had time to experiment, let us know what you think and which other layouts you'd like to see. Feedback is always welcome in our support forum and IRC channel.

Last year we launched the Transliteration API as an addition to the AJAX Language API. This gave users the ability to transliterate (the process of phonetically converting words from one script into another) text into several Indic languages using a normal English keyboard.

We're happy to announce that we've now added Arabic to the list of supported languages. Now, you can allow your users to easily input Arabic-language text into any text field or text area on your web page without switching to a non-Latin alphabet keyboard - just like on the Labs page. For example, if the user types 'mar7aban bekom', the API will transliterate each word, with the result 'مرحبا بكم' (Arabic for welcome). The API will even automatically adjust the direction of the text area to support this right-to-left language.

Take a look at the documentation and then head over to the Code Playground to give it a try for yourself. If you have any questions, stop by the Google AJAX API developer forum or IRC channel.