Johan's blog

OpenSocial, Shindig and Dali

I blogged about OpenSocial about a month ago. Meanwhile, we started the integration of the Shindig reference implementation with DaliCMS.

According to the Shindig website at http://incubator.apache.org/shindig/,

Shindig is a new project in the Apache Software Foundation incubator and is an open source implementation of the OpenSocial specification and gadgets specification.

The main reason why Shindig is important for us at LodgON is that it provides a Javascript implementation of the OpenSocial container specification.
As a consequence, Shindig can be used when implementing an OpenSocial compliant platform. Using Shindig, developers can test their own gadgets against a dummy implementation of a backend containing users and activities. The challenge is of course to connect the Shindig gadget container with a real-world backend.
At this moment, we are integrating the Shindig requests with the functionality available in DaliCMS. The code is not yet committed in the trunk, but the gadget requests are now routed through Shindig and handled by the DaliCMS backend (the BoardBean is used for handling all requests).

For a developer, this is already cool. But we also have a number of commercial projects in the pipeline that will make use of this integration. The benefits of having an OpenSocial compliant community are huge. The facebook developer network itself is already a large community, and applications developed for Facebook work on Facebook only. Application developed for any OpenSocial compliant container work on all other OpenSocial containers (LinkedIn, MySpace, Orkut,... and soon Dali).

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