This week Google announced their new Gmail API. Predictably, certain segments of the internet went insane. My response was “oh, its about time”. To understand its purpose, and why its not (yet) a replacement for IMAP, you have to understand how it fits with the rest of the integration points Gmail offers to developers. Years ago Gmail started offering a feature called contextual gadgets. They were actually quite clever. As well as the code, you’d write a manifest that described a bunch ...
