It was great seeing the Embedded experiences demo at the Rave Hackleton last
week; this is a proposed feature for OpenSocial whereby widgets can be embedded
into activity streams and other kinds of feeds with some context data, and
looks like a really nice feature for users.
I had a look at the spec[1], and it actually wouldn't need any new code in
Wookie to work fine for W3C Widgets too, and minimal additions to the W3C
provider in Rave.
E.g., an embed referencing a widget identifier rather than OpenSocial XML file
looks like this:
<embed>
<gadget>http://wookie.apache.org/widgets/youtube</gadget>
<context>9gW2YVBrNVA</context>
</embed>
In this case, we want the YouTube widget to be embedded, playing the specified
movie.
To render, we can just push the context into the widget using widget
preferences; in WookieWidgetService in rave-w3c-provider it would look like
this:
private W3CWidget getWidgetForViewer(Widget widget, String sharedDataKey,
User viewer, String eeContextData){
try {
connectorService = getWookieConnectorService(wookieServerUrl,
wookieApiKey, sharedDataKey);
org.apache.wookie.connector.framework.User user = new
org.apache.wookie.connector.framework.User(String.valueOf(viewer.getUsername()),
viewer.getUsername());
connectorService.setCurrentUser(user);
WidgetInstance instance =
connectorService.getOrCreateInstance(widget.getUrl());
// Now push the context data in for embedded experiences//
connectorService.setPropertyForInstance(instance, false,
"org.opensocial.ee.context", eeContext);
return createWidget(instance);
The Widget can then call
widget.preferences.getItem("org.opensocial.ee.context") to check for the movie
id.
So if/when Rave does add support for embedded experiences, we can do so across
widget types pretty trivially.
S
[1] http://docs.opensocial.org/display/OSD/Embedded+Experiences
