Announcing new Google Cloud Client Libraries for four key services
Omar Ayoub
Product Manager
Google Cloud Platform offers a range of services and APIs supported by an impressive backend infrastructure. But to benefit from the power and capabilities of our APIs, you as a developer also need a great client-side experience: client libraries you’ll actually want to use, that are well documented, and that are easy to access.
That’s why we are announcing today the beta release of the new Google Cloud Client Libraries for four of our cloud services: BigQuery, Google Cloud Datastore, Stackdriver Logging, and Google Cloud Storage. These libraries are idiomatic, well-documented, open-source, and cover seven server-side languages: C#, Go, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, and Ruby. Most importantly, this new family of libraries is for GCP specifically and provides a consistent experience as you use each of these four services.
Finding client libraries fast
We want to make it easy for you to discover client libraries on cloud.google.com, so we updated our product documentation pages with a prominent client library section for each of these four products. Here’s what you can see in the left-hand navigation bar of the BigQuery documentation APIs & Reference section:
Click on the Client Libraries link to see the new Client Libraries page and select the language of your choice to learn how to install the library:
Right underneath the installation section, there’s a sample that shows how to make an API call. Set up auth using a single command, copy-paste the sample code and replace your variables, and you’ll be up and running in no time.
Lower in the page, you can find the links to access the library’s GitHub repo, ask a question on StackOverflow, or navigate to the client library reference for your specific language:
Client libraries you’ll want to use
The new Google Cloud Client Libraries were built with usability in mind from day one. We strive to make the libraries idiomatic and include the usage patterns you expect from your programming language -- so you feel right at home when you code against them.They should also include plenty of samples. Each client library reference now includes a code example for every language and every API method showing you how to work with the API and best practices. For instance, the Node.js client library reference for BigQuery displays the following code with the createDataset method:
Furthermore, the product documentation on cloud.google.com for each of the four APIs contains many how-to guides with targeted samples for all our supported languages. For example, here is the code for learning how to stream data into BigQuery:
Next steps
This is just the beginning for Google Cloud Client Libraries. Our first job is to make the libraries for these four APIs generally available. We’ll also add support for more APIs, improve our documentation across the board, and keep adding more samples.We take developer experience seriously and want to hear from you. Feel free to file issues on GitHub in one of our client library repositories or ask questions on StackOverflow.
Happy Coding!
