Find: Google Plugin for Eclipse now provides richer tooling for Cloud SQL and Google APIs

Google Plugin for Eclipse now provides richer tooling for Cloud SQL and Google APIs

Google Code Blog

By Sriram Saroop, Product Manager

We are pleased to announce the latest release of Google Plugin for Eclipse (GPE 2.6) with improved tooling for Cloud SQL and Google APIs. GPE 2.6 introduces the following features:

• Tooling for using Java Persistence API (JPA) to access Cloud SQL
• Importing the latest Google APIs into your GPE project

Tooling for using Java Persistence API (JPA) to access Cloud SQL

Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) frameworks are very popular in the Java community for accessing relational databases. The Eclipse Web Tools Platform offers a robust set of tools to configure and use JPA with an implementation of your choice. With the new Google Plugin for Eclipse (GPE) 2.6, you can now take advantage of these tools with Cloud SQL and Google App Engine. In any GPE project, JPA can now be enabled and configured as a project facet. The screenshot below shows the JPA facet configuration for a GPE project.

Spotted: Strategies for crowdsourcing social data analysis -- taming the Turk

Strategies for crowdsourcing social data analysis

ACM CHI

Wesley Willett, Jeffrey Heer, Maneesh Agrawala

Web-based social data analysis tools that rely on public discussion to produce hypotheses or explanations of the patterns and trends in data, rarely yield high-quality results in practice. Crowdsourcing offers an alternative approach in which an analyst pays workers to generate such explanations. Yet, asking workers with varying skills, backgrounds and motivations to simply "Explain why a chart is interesting" can result in irrelevant, unclear or speculative explanations of variable quality. To address these problems, we contribute seven strategies for improving the quality and diversity of worker-generated explanations. Our experiments show that using (S1) feature-oriented prompts, providing (S2) good examples, and including (S3) reference gathering, (S4) chart reading, and (S5) annotation subtasks increases the quality of responses by 28% for US workers and 196% for non-US workers.