Introducing the Google Places API

A couple of weeks ago, at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, Google announced the opening up and general availability of the Google Places API. The Google Places API is an API that returns information about Places. It is part of the Google Maps API Web Services, a collection of HTTP interfaces to Google services providing geographic data for your maps applications. The goal of this article is to go over the API by using a sample application that actually does these API calls. We'll cover each API request in detail, look at the raw JSON response coming back from the Google Places API, see how to process the response using the Google APIs Client Library for Java. We'll also convert the JSON response into a java based model, and use that model to display the results.

Introducing the Google Fusion Tables API

In this article, I'll be providing you with a quick overview of the Fusion Tables API. Google Fusion Tables is a modern data management and publishing web application that makes it easy to host, manage, collaborate on, visualize, and publish data tables online. We'll go over the API by creating a sample application that interacts with our Fusion Tables. The sample app will use the Google APIs Client Library for Java and the complete source code is available on GitHub.