In advance of the Google I/O conference in May (which I’m stoked that I’ll be attending and covering live), Yves Hiernaux, CEO of BeeBole flicked me an email telling me that they’re hoping to be invited to the developer sandbox at the event.
In order to showcase their own take on where they’re going integrating Google chart tools into the application they’re developing, BeeBole produced this video showing how they’re using the API to create graphical representations of the underlying data in BeeBole.
It’s an interesting video and hopefully does enough to get BeeBole a place at the conference but even more importantly it’s an example of just how easy it is to create applications now compared to only a few years ago. Until recently, a company wanting to create this sort of dashboard would have had to wrangle code and get down and dirty with development tools to do this. Today it’s simply a case of integrating with a ready built best-of-breed charting tool.
Extrapolate this ease through to other functional areas – mapping, calculations, documentation etc – and you quickly see how third party tools and the power of the API are changing the world.
Of course there’s the minor point of having to execute a business strategy, I wonder when Google will develop an API for that….
Thank you Ben.
While using the Google Chart Tools API was indeed quite straight forward, building the application framework you can see in the video was a lot more adventurous.
But the flexibility it gives to the users is key.
And, please, don’t make fun of my accent !