The official Google blog announced that they’ve opened up the Visualization API to include any data source. Stepping back a bit, earlier this year Google introduced the Visualization API for developers to render reports, charts, pivot tables, heatmaps and other visualization imagery from data in Google Spreadsheets. This API is no longer restricted to Google Spreadsheets… it has now been expanded and opened up so that it can be integrated into many other sources…
Developers will now be able to create reporting tools or applications that visualizes data from databases such as SQL or MySQL and other spreadsheet software such ie. Excel.
As more and more data is stored on the cloud through cloud computing platforms such as MS Azure, Force.com, Amazon AWS/EC2 or Google’s own App Engine… it was important for Google to open this up to non-Google software. The tool is very cool, especially the themes and report designs listed on the Visualization Gadget Gallery…
As part of the announcement the post refers to a Dreamforce announcement about a SalesForce implementation whereby users of the SalesForce CRM platfrom (and the applications sitting on the Force.com cloud) can now integrate their data and create reports, charts and dashboards using the Visualization API.
As an aside, SalesForce have also made a series of announcements at their DreamForce conference… about new features on Force.com to allow integration with Amazon’s AWS and Facebook… the latter could encourage some interesting CRM + Social Networking implementations. TheRegister wrote this article about the new features, and also raise SalesForce’s position on the MS Azure announcement 2 weeks ago.
As you can probably tell… there’s a lot of noise about Cloud Computing now… more so than there was over the last couple of years (when Force.com and AWS were the only 2)… watch this space.
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