1300 developers descended on the Sydney Convention Centre to attend Google Developer Day and learn about what Google terms as being “the prefect storm for web developers”.

During the keynote, the company announced Google+ Pages and App Engine as leaving beta, as well as highlighting Google Cloud SQL.

Google+ Pages allows companies to create brand pages in much the same manner as Facebook Pages. The launch of Pages explains the reasoning behind Google’s decision to change the functionality of the + operator in search queries. Using the + operator now takes the user directly to a branded Google+ page, a feature that Google calls Direct Connect. A deeper analysis of Google+ Pages was done by Kevin Purdy.

The search giant’s cloud application engine, App Engine, has left beta and is now fully supported, with 99.95 percent guaranteed reliability and paid support available. App Engine is now certified for ISAE 3402, SSAE 16, and SAS 70.

App Engine makes use of Google’s BigTable databases, but for developers who wish to remain in the world of SQL, the company has launched Google Cloud SQL. The service provides a MySQL environment, and allows developers to code in familiar SQL queries. No username or password is needed to connect Cloud SQL to App Engine, as a chain of trust is implicitly provided between the services.

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