Google Code is Closing Down Because Developers Aren't Using It

Google Code is Closing Down

google code

Google Developers (previously Google Code) is Google's site for software development tools, application programming interfaces (APIs), and technical resources. The site contains documentation on using Google developer tools and APIs—including discussion groups and blogs for developers using Google's developer products.

There are APIs offered for almost all of Google's popular consumer products, like Google Maps, YouTube, Google Apps, and others.

The site also features a variety of developer products and tools built specifically for developers. Google App Engine is a hosting service for web apps. Project Hosting gives users version control for open source code. Google Web Toolkit (GWT) allows developers to create Ajax applications in the Java programming language.

The site contains reference information for community based developer products that Google is involved with like Android from the Open Handset Alliance and OpenSocial from the OpenSocial Foundation.

Google is closing its programming project hosting service, Google Code, after nine years of operations. Google stopped users from creating new projects yesterday and will make existing project read-only this August, ahead of a complete closure scheduled for January 25th, 2016. The search giant  says it started Google Code when project hosting options were limited, but since launch in 2006, it's seen a "wide variety of better project hosting services" such as GitHub and Bitbucket rise to the forefront.

To "meet developers where they are," Google itself has transferred nearly a thousand of its own open-source projects to the popular coding repository GitHub. The migration of developers to new services has left Google Code dealing with a deluge of spam and abuse — the company says that recently the administrative load has consisted almost entirely of abuse management, and when it polled the remaining constructive projects, it decided the service wasn't worth maintaining.

"Google has transferred projects to GitHub"

The closure is the latest in a line of projects Google has shuttered after they were beaten out by opponents. But Google Code was not another Google Wave — Google's programming repository existed before the current industry leaders, and the company freely admits its rivals win out in terms of functionality. To that end, developers with projects still on Google Code can port them to GitHub or Bitbucket using dedicated tools noted on the official Google Code blog.

via The Verge, Rich McCormick