I tried three times write this drop, but they just become too long. I guess after I am going to write a roadmap + shortcuts to make the first app accessing Google+.
So, What are The First impressions? They are:
* You will need the new Google Client API big time. That is nor bad neither good.
I tested the JAVA flavour wrapper for the API
- JAVA is naturally verbose, but the Google Client API wrapper to JAVA is too much for my taste... I guess the objective is to make it the most detached possible, even so...
- Documentation is kinda misleading. For instance:
- They divulged the Google Client API, but what I was expecting was the Google+ API, it is not so straightforward to get you need the client API to authenticate and one API for each service to get the wrappers for that service
- The featured version of the Google Client API for JAVA is the 1.4.3, but the Google+ service API JAVA wrapper version 1.2.1 is incompatible with it. So, if you get some error like: java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: com.google.api.client.http.json.JsonHttpParser. download the version 1.5.0 of the client API 1
- I have no idea why my calls for Person.getName() and Person.getNickName() are returning null
* There are a lot of runtime errors out there, if your user has a google account, but no account in the specific service, Google+ in our case, I got 404 error. We should keep this in mind. There are tons of things that could get wrong during the communication and Google recommends that kind error don’t blow in the user face. Let’s pay attention.
+ Google Client/Services API are opensource (they are under the Apache License 2.0)
- The main missing feature is public information is too little. Google justifies that saying is only the first step of a long journey . They should rush, facebook is quickly copying the great features of Google+
+ Google is providing a great set of language wrappers (even if they are in beta, or even alpha). That is a ball facebook drop long ago, and twitter never bothered about
* This API use OAuth 2.0 draft 10, but the wrappers make things simple enough to don’t need to dive in the subject
* You should read the whole documentation of client API in your favourite language before to jump in coding (don’t repeat my mistakes).
* I wonder how we will set the data access. I haven’t read about the access limitations, but I wonder if a app could get in all my post, or photos, or videos sometime. That goes in the opposite direction of specific and limited shares. I guess app could be like elements I put in circles and share with them some amount of data, granular and event specific. I don’t want apps out there accessing all my data similar to facebook.
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