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Editor’s Note: Guest author Mark Showalter is a Senior Research Scientist at the SETI Institute. — Arun Nagarajan

In 2011 and 2012, while studying the region around Pluto with the Hubble Space Telescope, I discovered the dwarf planet’s fourth and fifth known moons. Like all new astronomical objects, they started out with rather prosaic names — “S/2011 (134340) 1” and “S/2012 (134340) 1”, or, for short, P4 and P5.

I soon found my inbox stuffed with hundreds of naming suggestions. With so much interest, it didn’t seem fair to leave the job to just a handful of scientists. Instead, we decided to let the public propose and vote on the names of Pluto’s moons.

We knew that the web servers at the SETI Institute, my research home, could never handle the bandwidth required for such a task. However, the Institute has built strong relationships with Google through our extensive use of G+, and our friends there were thrilled to let us use Google services for the demanding task. I asked my husband Frank Yellin, who works on the Gmail team, for help in setting up the forms and collecting the data. Google Forms and Google Sheets were obvious choices, but with the volume of contributions and votes we were expecting, we knew we’d need programmatic help checking for duplicate nominees, filtering out inappropriate names, and tallying the votes.

Frank is a longtime Java engineer, so he tried a Java solution first. As the votes started to pour in at the rate of several per second, however, it became clear that the program could barely keep pace. Votes were coming in almost as fast as they were being downloaded and tallied. In a panic, Frank realized it was time to learn Apps Script — in fact, time to learn JavaScript altogether.

With some help from his colleagues (“How do I split a string?” “How do I make a hash table?”), he turned the project around in a few hours. Processing that had taken tens of minutes using Java took mere seconds in Apps Script, since nothing but the results ever had to leave the data center.

We were right to be prepared. By the time we closed the write-in ballot, we had received 30,000 write-in nominees and more than 450,000 votes.

We are now using the results of the poll to support our proposal for the formal names of P4 and P5. That decision is currently in the hands of the International Astronomical Union. When the final decision is made, Pluto and Charon and Nix and Hydra will be joined by two more representatives of the ancient underworld.

Dr. Mark Showalter   profile Planetary scientist Mark Showalter is a Senior Research Scientist at the SETI Institute. His primary interest in the dynamics of planetary rings. To date, this interest has led him to discover five new moons and three new rings.

For a while now, many of you have been asking for a better way to access data to build apps that integrate with Gmail. While IMAP is great at what it was designed for (connecting email clients to email servers in a standard way), it wasn’t really designed to do all of the cool things that you have been working on, which is why this week at Google I/O, we’re launching the beta of the new Gmail API.

Designed to let you easily deliver Gmail-enabled features, this new API is a standard Google API, which gives RESTful access to a user’s mailbox under OAuth 2.0 authorization. It supports CRUD operations on true Gmail datatypes such as messages, threads, labels and drafts.

As a standard Google API, you make simple HTTPS calls and get your responses in JSON, XML or Google Protobuf formats. You can also make these calls from standard web languages like Java and Python without using a TCP socket, which means the API is accessible from many cloud environments that couldn’t support IMAP.

In contrast to IMAP, which requires access to all of a user’s messages for all operations, the new API gives fine-grained control to a user’s mailbox. For example, if your app only needs to send mail on behalf of a user and does not need to read mail, you can limit your permission request to send-only.

To keep in sync, the API allows you to query the inbox change history, thereby avoiding the need to do “archaeology” to figure out what changed.

Finally, a huge benefit is speed. While there’s still some tuning to be done (“beta” - remember?), results from our tests and feedback from pre-release developers suggest that the new Gmail API is delivering dramatic performance improvements over IMAP for web application use cases.

Check out the launch video and get started with samples, tutorials, and API references at https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/. We can’t wait to see what you build.

Posted by Eric DeFriez, Gmail Extensibility Team. As a technical lead for Gmail APIs, Eric works to make it easy for developers to build on top of Gmail.

Editors Note: This post was originally published on the Google Enterprise Blog. We decided to re-post it here as we think itll be interesting to readers of the Google Apps Developer Blog.

Google Apps is designed to provide a secure and reliable platform for your data. Until today, Google Apps administrators had to sign requests for calls to Google Apps APIs using their username and password (this is called ClientLogin Authorization).

Yet sharing passwords across sites can pose security risks. Furthering our commitment to make the cloud more secure for our users, today we are pleased to announce support for OAuth authorization on Google Apps APIs.

There are several advantages to using OAuth instead of the username/password model:

• OAuth is more secure: OAuth tokens can be scoped and set to expire by a certain date, making them more secure than using the ClientLogin mechanism.
• OAuth is customizable: Using OAuth, you can create tokens that scripts may only use to access data of a particular scope when calling Google Apps APIs. For instance, a token set to call the Email Migration API would not be able to use your login credentials to access the Google Apps Provisioning API.
• OAuth is an open standard: OAuth is an open source standard, making it a familiar choice for developers to work with.

The Google Apps APIs that support the OAuth signing mechanism are:

1. Provisioning API
2. Email Migration API
3. Admin Settings API
4. Calendar Resource API
5. Email Settings API
6. Audit API

OAuth support for Google Apps APIs is another step towards making Google Apps the most secure, reliable cloud based computing environment for organizations. To learn more about OAuth support and other administrative capacities launched in Google Apps this quarter, join us for a live webinar on Wednesday, September 29th at 9am PT / 12pm EST / 5pm GMT.

Administrators for Google Apps Premier, Education, and Government Editions can use OAuth authorization for Google Apps APIs starting today.For more information about the OAuth standard, visit http://oauth.net.

Posted by Ankur Jain, Software Engineer

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