Learning AJAX APIs Made Interactive

As a developer, I always like to play around with the code or APIs while we’re learning something new. Documentation or manual or book is never enough for developers to learn. Usually this is a painful and time consuming process because we need to setup the testing environment, copy and paste and compile the source code and load it to the testing environment. Everytime we make some changes, we need to re-load to the testing environment manually.

Now there’s a good news for those developers who are working on Google’s JavaScript APIs or those who are planning to use in future. Google just released a interactive teaching tool, AJAX APIs Playground. This tool was developed by Google engineer, Ben Lisbakken, who spent 20% of his working time to develop this wonderful tool.

Note: Google encourages employees to spend 20% of their working time on their own project.

Currently it’s loaded with over 170 samples for 9 Google JavaScript APIs (Maps, Search, Feeds, Calendar, Visualization, Language, Blogger, Libraries and Earth) that you can start playing with immediately.

Feature

With this tool, there are 6 main features:

1. Pick APIs
2. Edit APIs
3. View Resullt Immediately
4. Save Modified APIs
5. View Full Source Code
6. Export APIs

#1 Pick APIs

First you can explore and pick any APIs in the tree-style navigation menu.

#2 Edit APIs

After you pick a API, you can see the code in the ‘Edit’ section. In this section, you’re free to make any modification you want.

#3 View Resullt Immediately

Once you modified, you can see the result immediately in the ‘Output’ section by clicking the ‘Run’ button.

#4 Save Modified APIs

The save feature allows you to hold onto an edited sample so you can continue working on it later.

#5 View Full Source Code

This feature lets you view the souce code including full working HTML.

#6 Export APIs

At last the export function allows you to publish the code to a permanent URL.

Enhancement

We can expect there will be more samples for more APIS loaded into this little tool in the near future as mentioned by the creator of this tool. It will be nice if it supports other AJAX APIs from public rather than Google.

Conclusion

It’s a fun, easy-to-use and interactive learning tool. With the release of this tool, I foresee that it will encourage more developers making use of Google’s JavaScript APIs in their products. Perhaps there will be more WordPress plugins integrated with Google products.

The AJAX APIs Playground is built on App Engine. The code is released as open source and you can find it on Google Project Hosting.

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