ReadWriteWeb

Github is now the most popular open source forge, having surpassed Sourceforge, Google Code and Microsoft's CodePlex in total number of commits for the period of January to May 2011, according to data released today by Black Duck Software. This should probably come as no surprise, but it's good to have data to back assumptions.

During the period Black Duck examined, Github had 1,153,059 commits, Sourceforge had 624,989, Google Code and 287,901 and CodePlex had 49,839.

Black Duck also found that C++ and Java were the most popular languages for commits in these forges during this period of time.

This week Google added a CodeMirror-powered code editor to Google Project Hosting. This enables developers to make quick changes to Google projects from within the browser without having to deal with Mercurial or Subversion.

It previews the changes that you are about to commit and, for contributors without commit privileges, it can file changes as a patch in the project's issue tracker.

The flood of news from Google I/O continues as the company has announced a pair of services available to developers that provide public access to some of Google's internal data-analysis tools. BigQuery, a service for analyzing massively large sets of data, and Prediction API, an interface for utilizing Google's prediction algorithms, are now available to developers in the Google Code Labs. To break down these heavy new tools, we spoke with former Apple engineer and big-data geek Pete Warden.

Warden believes these new tools from Google could commoditize previously close-guarded technologies, allowing startups to quickly and easily leverage things like sentiment-analysis. "Assuming it does what it says on the label, this opens up a lot of technology problems to bootstrapped startups that previously required serious funding to tackle," he told ReadWriteWeb.

Google just announced two new features for some of its most popular APIs: partial response and partial update. This, according to Google, is part of the company's efforts to make the web faster. Instead of having to pull a full feed of data from Google Calendar, which usually included lots of extra information you don't really need, developers can now request a partial response that only includes relevant data. Developers can also use the new partial update feature to edit this data and send it back to the server without having to touch any of the unneeded data.

Google is open sourcing a collection of Javascript tools today that will enable developers to build faster, more powerful and more efficient web applications using some of the same code that runs Gmail, Google Maps and Docs.

Why is Google doing this? Because the more powerful web applications become, the more important Google's search, browser and nascent OS become. More relevant to developers than some grand anti-Microsoft conspiracy, though, is that some serious UI sweetness may be forthcoming.

Google announced today the launch of a new site, Google Code Labs, where developers can find links to all the major code projects that Google staff is working on. It's a central place to find APIs that 3rd parties can build off of and it includes a clarification of what projects Google has made a long term commitment to and what they have not. We were a little surprised to see what the company considers "graduated" from Labs and what's still there.

Perhaps nothing like this should be a surprise coming from a company that built the leading webmail product online and still calls it Beta five years later.

What's the most in-demand API on the web that hasn't existed until today? Wether they knew it or not, millions of people online have thought to themselves "why is this new site I'm on asking me for my Gmail username and password? When will there be a secure API for me to pass those contacts allong without giving up my password?"

That day has come. The Google Contacts API went live tonight and it enables far more than just contact transfer.