It’s clear based on Google’s staging of 10 developer events worldwide on Thursday that the company is gaining traction among developers, a considerable achievement for a company best known for its search engine. The Google Developer Day 2007 event at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, Calif. attracted 1,500 developers and had to be moved from Google’s nearby offices in Mountain View, Calif. to accommodate the larger-than-expected crowd. Sure, the event was free, which certainly didn’t hurt attendance. But it appears Google, with its various APIs and popular applications such as Google Maps, has gained quite a following.“Everyone in our project team is on with a Google account in Gmail and we talk to each other with our Google account,” said attendee Stewart Long, who teaches junior college geography in the San Diego area and also is involved with an aerial imagery venture that leverages Google Earth. Another attendee, Jesse Cohen, a GIS specialist who works at San Francisco State University, cited his use of Google Maps to provide a lower level visualization process. “We’re just looking to get more options,” for different levels of Web mapping, said Cohen in explaining his presence at the event. Collaboration was on the mind of another attendee, who uses Google APIs and requested anonymity. Prior to using Google, Microsoft products were used for collaboration; work was contracted out and that took time, the attendee said. Blogger Frank Taylor writes the Google Earth blog, dedicated to Google’s 3D mapping software. Google Earth has promoted a lot of interest in satellite and aerial photography, he said at the San Jose event. “It’s the one that really in many ways spawned all the enthusiasm about all of this,” Taylor said. Other Google technologies include Google Web Toolkit (GWT), which was upgraded this week with version 1.4, and Google Gears, unveiled this week. During a panel session in San Jose, panelists led by GWT developer Bruce Johnson pondered what version 1.5 of the toolkit might look like. Capabilities suggested included generics, Java 1.5 language support and the ability to turn Java code directly into JavaScript. Software Development