Johan's blog
OpenSocial, JavaScript and Java
I am working with OpenSocial for a while now. Apart from the organizational challenges (aligning the companies behind Orkut, MySpace, hi5,...), there are a lot of architectural and conceptual discussions going on at the OpenSocial mailing lists. This is not a surprise, OpenSocial defines a JavaScript "environment" (client-part) where the implementations also require a server part that can be done in any language -- including Java.The benefits of OpenSocial are explained very well on the OpenSocial website and on a number of blogs and forums. There are two target groups for the OpenSocial specifications: container developers (e.g. MySpace, LinkedIn but also Dali) and widget developers. LodgON is active in both areas, so we follow discussions on a number of mailing lists.
Widget developers are mainly concerned with how easy, transparent and portable it is to retrieve social data from an OpenSocial container. We currently use a slightly modified version of the Apache Shindig reference implementation, which provides a gadget container in JavaScript, and which handles the JavaScript requests up to REST or RPC requests into a Java class.
At that point, Dali takes over and the data is retrieved from the Dali platform and handed back to the Shindig implementation, which will serialize the result.
Our internal speed of development increased a lot because of Shindig. We don't have to waste time in debugging JavaScript calls. We tell clients to stick with the spec, thereby guaranteeing compliance with OpenSocial. Well, "guaranteeing" is a huge word for a spec that is currently in a 0.8.1 version, and where lots of important discussions are still happening (this is actually something else that I like about OpenSocial: discussions and proposals are very public).
I hope to release our first commercial customer using the OpenSocial compliant version of Java in the near future. We have two customer projects that are in an advanced stage, so it should happen before the end of the year.
