Blockly Development: For Building Any and Every Google App: a blog around google blockly
Blockly Development: For Building Any and Every Google App: a blog around google blockly
May 17, 2016 by Gary Sims
When you visit the Blockly website you are greeted with this statement: “Programming for a wide range of ages”. Given that Blockly is used in many education apps it’s not surprising that it can be used to teach children how to code. But what about using Blockly for a more professional audience? Can Blockly really be used for developing real applications? The answer is yes and in this article we will show you how.
What is Blockly?
Blockly is an open source library that can be used to create visual programming environments, such as drag and drop languages. These programs can then be compiled into other languages, such as JavaScript or Python. As an example of how this works, let’s look at a simple block that adds two numbers together.
“Blockly Development: For Building Any and Every Google App” is a blog around Blockly, a web-based graphical programming language that consists of blocks that represent code concepts. It is used in Google products such as Code Studio, App Inventor, and OpenBlocks.
The blog highlights “the latest news, tutorials and interesting apps built with Blockly.”**
Google Blockly is a programming tool that can be embedded in web pages. It uses code blocks that can be manipulated. It is the building block for some of Google apps, including the App Inventor, and the Android and iOS versions of Puzzle Blocks. The developer blog covers news and updates on Google Blockly.
The site is maintained by Neil Fraser, who also worked on the Dart programming language at Google.
When we first introduced Blockly, our goal was to create an open source library that would make it easier for Google and other companies to build tools for coding.
Blockly is a visual programming language that allows developers to build applications by dragging and dropping blocks of code. The tool was initially developed in Google’s Sydney office by Neil Fraser, who integrated it with Google App Engine, the company’s cloud computing platform, for the 2012 Hour of Code. It has since been used to power dozens of Google tools and apps, including Tynker, the MIT-based Scratch programming language and the Makey Makey invention kit.
“We have seen Blockly used in so many innovative ways,” said Neil Fraser, Technical Lead at Google.”With this new website, we hope it will be even easier for developers to find the parts they need and collaborate on new projects.”
Google Blockly was designed to be the simplest programming language possible, a building block to help students and adults learn the basics of programming. The end goal is to create a series of games that teach a user how to program, similar to programs like Code Academy or Khan Academy.
The Blockly development team has been busy expanding the scope of this language beyond just apps and games. In fact, there are now several different applications being designed in Blockly, including one that is intended as an aid for visually impaired people.
New Blocks Help Visually Impaired
Blockly is getting some new blocks that will help users who are visually impaired. This includes new braille input/output blocks and better support for screen readers. This allows developers to build apps and games that can be used by the visually impaired without having to learn how to read braille or use a screen reader themselves, which can be difficult skills to learn.
There are also other improvements being made so that Blockly apps can be used on mobile devices. The idea is that users will be able to write code on an Android phone or tablet instead of having to use a laptop or desktop computer.
Blockly is a library for building block programming apps. It is a project of Google and is open source under the Apache License 2.0. We’ve been using it for the last few years to make apps for Android, iOS, web and beyond.
Blockly is used in dozens of apps, but there are two that you may have heard of: App Inventor and Google Articles. App Inventor lets you create mobile apps by snapping blocks together, while Google Articles lets you write code by snapping blocks together. You can see how they look and work in these videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjZDQ2QIb_g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjZDQ2QIb_g
The Google App Engine Blog is a place where engineers from the Google App Engine team talk about their technical adventures with the Google App Engine. This blog provides insights into building scalable web applications and APIs on Google’s infrastructure.