Dear Members of the Apache Shindig Community, We are two undergraduate students in the Informatics & Telematics Department at Harokopio University <http://www.dit.hua.gr>, Athens, Greece, working on Shindig as a part of our thesis. The aim is to build an academic social network site (SNS),which will consist of multiple types of the entity "Person" and therefore, multiple types of relationships.
To this point, we have succeeded in replacing the Derby database with MySQL (by following the respective tutorial in Shindig’s Cwiki). We extended the database provided by default and -meddling with Shindig's JPA and storage objects- made sure that most of the REST and JSON-RPC operations will work for our schema. And they actually do! Taking it one step further, we seem to have trouble, as no sample gadget seems to work and there’s no standard way for us to check whether Shindig is safely extended. Looking around the Web, we still haven’t found a valid answer about what we should do next. That being the case, we would honestly appreciate any hint or walk-through about: 1. How to ensure that our “Gadget Testing Container” will “properly” communicate with our extended MySQL database. We tried to set “using state” for that purpose, but we are not really sure what to do. 2. How to execute a simple gadget in this container, for example one that returns the friends of a specific person (no extended fields or functionality required). We are able to do that in a Shindig installation with Derby database. 3. How to execute a simple gadget similar to the on above, utilizing additional fields of the person table or additional relations other that fields, for example “tutor”. 4. How to enable inter-gadget communication, using simple JSON data structures stored in App Data. The above tasks are essential for getting back in track and on our schedule, always hoping about a more than just satisfying result. With that said, we are really interested in becoming a part of the Shindig community, so that we can provide some feedback and our own experience on extending OpenSocial standards. Thank you in advance, Panagiotis Katsivelis-Perakis (*[email protected]*) Valentino Hudhra (*[email protected]*) Harokopion University of Athens Department of Informatics and Telematics
