I'd like to see an open source Rails implementation, and if no one else is working on it then I'm prepared to write it myself.
Paul Linder says he's going to open source the Hi5 container implementation. From what I've heard from other partners about the state of the documentation, it's probably going to be a lot easier to copy someone else's reference implementation (Thanks Paul!) http://groups.google.com/group/opensocial-container/browse_thread/thread/43522fdcccf6cbe2 So taking his lead, this is what we could be working on right now. > 1) Investigate what server-side support you have for the Atom protocol. > Activity streams are closely related to Atom Feeds. I couldn't find any existing Atom code that was worth anything. A Google search says that there's an Atom Publishing Protocol framework for Rails, but it's just a bunch of stub code and seems to have been written for Rails 0.13 (read: abandoned). I think, though, that everything we need to implement this is already in Google's published documentation. See the OpenSocial Data APIs. http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/docs/gdata/people/reference.html > 2) Investigate Foaf support for your server. Hi5's container uses Foaf > requests to quickly serve up profile and friend requests. This sounds cool, like it'll make it easier to build container code that's reusable in many Rails projects. So, I looked for the state of the art in Rails and FOAF. What I found was the SWORD project of ActiveRDF. Unfortunately, the project doesn't actually display FOAF, it just stores it. And it stores it in an RDF data store, so it doesn't seem very practical for most people. http://wiki.activerdf.org/SWORD I couldn't find any clear description of how to implement FOAF in Rails, so I wrote one myself. It includes code. I think the builder template will be useful to most people, although I don't know if it includes all the meta data that Hi5 is relying on. http://blog.crowdvine.com/2007/11/04/implementing-foaf-in-rails/ Some other thoughts... I didn't understand what it meant to be a container until I actually tried to build the widget from their first tutorial and host it on my site. At first I thought I just needed to respond to the API calls, but if you look at the code that makes up a widget you'll see that it's an XML block and not anything that's displayable. So part of the job of the container is to read in that XML block (which can be hosted by the widget provider) and turn it into something displayable. http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/articles/firstgadget.html It looks like it might be helpful to have an Orkut sandbox account. All of us are going to have to become good enough widget developers to test our container code and we'll all be happy to have a known working container to test against. There's a waiting list for getting your account approved (I had to wait about 24 hours). I totally ignored my lack of Orkut account and general lack of understanding and then tried to build the example module and load it the way Google gadgets are generally loaded (according to view source). My attempt looked something like this: http://gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=http://www.myserver.com/example_widget.xml Other people have tried that too, and we get a javascript error: "open social is not defined." So part of the job of the container is to provide some javascript libraries. I bet these libraries could be grabbed by digging in to the way Orkut returns a widget. I'm not sure if I'm that desperate yet. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "OpenSocial Container Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/opensocial-container?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
