Building Browsergames

Using Google in your game

Sure, Google is the king of web search right now – but did you know that there are a few other services Google provides that you can use in your game?

Google Apps

Google Apps allows you to set up your own suite of Google-driven applications, for free – giving you shared documents, e-mail, calendars, and wikis. If you have control of your domain’s DNS records and haven’t already set up any MX records for another service, I would highly recommend Google Apps for your e-mail – I’ve been using the service for the last 6 months on a number of side projects, and haven’t had to deal with any headaches or downtime. Also, a 99.9% uptime guarantee is great if(like me) your core competency is development instead of e-mail.

Google Ajax APIs

Google also makes available a large number of Ajax APIs for developers – which lets you build things like Google Maps into your game, for free. One of the more useful APIs that they make available is their Ajax Libraries API – which means that you no longer have to worry about hosting your own copy of the core libraries for the javascript framework you’re using. The benefit of using Google’s Ajax Libraries API comes from caching, primarily – if users have visited a page that used the Google Ajax Libraries API before they visit your site, the javascript will be cached – which means that’s one piece of code their browser won’t need to fetch again when they visit your page. In the end, this results in a speed boost for your site – and even if the user doesn’t have the library cached yet, Google’s servers are configured with optimal performance and cachability in mind, so you don’t need to worry about doing that yourself.

Those are just two of the services Google offers that are useful to browsergames and not every developer knows about; are there any other Google tools your game is using?

Luke is the primary editor of Building Browsergames, and has written a large portion of the articles that you read here. He generally has no idea what to say when asked to write about himself in the third person.

Tags: api, google