With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...| By Dare Obasanjo | Article Rating: |
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| November 6, 2007 02:45 AM EST | Reads: |
44,782 |
Dare
Obasanjo's Carnage4Life Blog
One of the Google folks working on OpenSocial sent me a message
via Facebook asking what I thought about
the technical details of the recent announcements. Since my day job is working
on social networking platforms for Web properties at Microsoft and I'm deeply
interested in RESTful protocols, this is something I definitely have some
thoughts about. Below is what started off as a private message but ended up
being long enough to be its own article.
First Impressions
In reading the OpenSocial API
documentation it seems clear that is intended to be the functional
equivalent of the Facebook platform.
Instead of the Facebook
users and friends APIs, we get the OpenSocial
People and Friends Data API. Instead of the Facebook
feed API, we get the OpenSocial
Activities API. Instead of the Facebook
Data Store API, we get the OpenSocial
Persistence Data API. Instead of FQL as a
friendly alternative to the various REST APIs we get a
JavaScript object model.
In general, I personally prefer the Facebook platform to OpenSocial. This is due to three reasons:
- There is no alternative to the deep integration into the Web site's user experience that is facilitated with FBML.
- I prefer idiomatic XML to tunneling data through Atom feeds in ways that [in my opinion] add unnecessary cruft.
- The Facebook APIs encourage developers to build social and item relationship graphs within their application while the OpenSocial seems only concerned with developers stuffing data in key/value pairs.
The JavaScript API
At first I assumed the OpenSocial
JavaScript API would provide similar functionality to FBML given the
large number of sound bites quoting Google employees stating that instead of
"proprietary markup" you could use "standard JavaScript" to
build OpenSocial
applications. However it seems the JavaScript API is simply a wrapper on top of
the various REST APIs. I'm sure there's some comment one could make questioning
if REST APIs are so simple why do developers feel the need to hide them behind
object models?
Given the varying features and user interface choices in social networking sites, it is unsurprising that there is no rich mechanism specified for adding entry points to the application into the container sites user interface. However it is surprising that no user interface hooks are specified at all. This is surprising given that there are some common metaphors in social networking sites (e.g., a profile page, a friends list, etc) which can be interacted with in a standard way. It is also shocking that Google attacked Facebook's use of "proprietary markup" only to not even ship an equivalent feature.
The People and Friends Data API
The People
and Friends Data API is used to retrieve information about a user or the
user's friends as an Atom feed. Each user is represented as an atom:entry which
is a PersonKind
(which should not be confused with an Atom person construct).
It is expected that the URL structure for accessing people and friends feeds
will be of the form http://<domain>/feeds/people/<userid> and
http://<domain>/feeds/people/<userid>/friends, respectively.
Compare the following response to a request for a user's information using OpenSocial with the equivalent Facebook API call response.
GET http://orkut.com/feeds/people/14358878523263729569
<entry xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom' xmlns:georss=
'http://www.georss.org/georss'
xmlns:gd='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005'>
<id>http://sandbox.orkut.com:80/feeds/people/14358878523
263729569</id>
<updated>2007-10-28T14:01:29.948-07:00</updated>
<title>Elizabeth
Bennet</title>
<link rel='thumbnail' type='image/*'
href='http://img1.orkut.com/images/small/1193601584/
115566312.jpg'/>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html'
href='http://orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=17583631990196664929'/>
<link rel='self'
type='application/atom+xml'
href='http://sandbox.orkut.com:80/feeds/people/
14358878523263729569'/>
<georss:where>
<gml:Point
xmlns:gml='http://www.opengis.net/gml'>
<gml:pos>51.668674
-0.066235</gml:pos>
</gml:Point>
</georss:where>
<gd:extendedProperty name='lang'
value='en-US'/>
<gd:postalAddress/>
</entry>
Below is what the above information would look like if returned by Facebook's users.getInfo method:
<users_getInfo_response xmlns="http://api.facebook.com/1.0/"xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://api.facebook.com/1.0/ http://api.facebook.com/
1.0/facebook.xsd"
list="true">
<user>
<uid>14358878523263729569</uid>
<current_location>
<city>Palo Alto</city>
<state>CA</state>
<country>United States</country>
</current_location>
<first_name>Elizabeth</first_name>
<is_app_user>1</is_app_user>
<has_added_app>1</has_added_app>
<pic>http://photos-055.facebook.com/ip007/profile3/
1271/65/s8055_39735.jpg
</pic>
</user>
</users_getInfo_response>
I've already mentioned that I prefer idiomatic XML to tunneling data through Atom feeds. Comparing the readability of both examples should explain why.
The Activities Data API
A number of social networking sites now provide a feature which enables users to see the recent activities of members of their social network in an activity stream. The Facebook news feed, Orkut's
updates from your friends, and the Windows
Live Spaces what's new page are all examples of this feature. The OpenSocial
Activities Data API provides a mechanism for OpenSocial applications to
access and update this activity stream as an Atom feed. All of the users activities
or all activities from a specific application can be accessed using URIs of the
form http://<domain>/activities/feeds/activities/user/<userID> and
http://<domain>/activities/feeds/activities/user/<userID>/source/<sourceID>,
respectively.
Currently there is no reference documentation on this API. My assumption is that since Orkut is the only OpenSocial site that supports this feature, it is difficult to produce a spec that will work for other services without it being a verbatim description of Orkut's implementation.
There are some notes on how Orkut attempts to prevent applications from spamming a user's activity stream. For one, applications are only allowed to update the activity stream for their source directly instead of the activity stream for the user. I assume that Google applies some filter to the union of all the source-specific activity streams before generating the user's activity feed to eliminate spam. Secondly, applications are monitored to see if they post too many messages to the activity stream or if they post promotional messages instead of the user's activities to the stream. All of this makes it seem difficult to see how one could specify the behavior of this API and feature set reliably for a diverse set of social networking sites.
The Persistence Data API
The OpenSocial
Persistence API allows applications to store and retrieve key<->value
pairs that are either user-specific or are global to the application. An
example of the former is a listing of company name and stock ticker pairs,
while an example of the latter is a user's stock portfolio. The feed of global
key<->value pairs for an application can be accessed at a URL of the form
http://<domain>/feeds/apps/<appID>/persistence/global for the
entire feed and
http://<domain>/feeds/apps/<appID>/persistence/global/<key>
if seeking a particular key<->value pair. User-specific key<->value
pairs are available at the URL of the form http://<domain>/feeds/apps/<appID>/persistence/<userID>/instance/<instan....
However, I will add that an Atom feed seems like a horrible representation for a list of key<->value pairs. It's so bad that the documentation doesn't provide an example of such a feed.
Hosting OpenSocial Applications
The documentation on hosting OpenSocial applications implies that any site that can host Google
gadgets can also host OpenSocial applications. In practice, it means that any site that you can place a <script> element on can point to a gadget and thus render it. Whether the application will actually work will depend on whether the hosting service has actually implemented the OpenSocial Service Provider Interface (SPI).
Unfortunately, the documentation on implementing the OpenSocial SPI is missing in action. From the Google site:
To host OpenSocial apps, your website must support the SPI side of the OpenSocial APIs. Usually your SPI will connect to your own social network, so that an OpenSocial app added to your website automatically uses your site's data. However, it is possible to use data from another social network as well, should you prefer. Soon, we will provide a development kit with documentation and code to better support OpenSocial websites, along with a sample sandbox which implements the OpenSocial SPI using in-memory storage. The SPI implements:
- Adding and removing friends Adding and removing apps
- Storing activities Retrieving activity streams for self and friends
- Storing and retrieving per-app and per-app-per-user data
The OpenSocial website development kit will include full SPI documentation. It will provide open source reference implementations for both client and server components.
I assume that the meat of the OpenSocial SPI documentation is just more detailed rules about how to implement the REST APIs described above. The interesting bits will likely be the reference implementations of the API which will likely become the de facto standard implementations instead of encouraging dozens of buggy incompatible versions of the OpenSocial API to bloom.
Published November 6, 2007 Reads 44,782
Copyright © 2007 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.
More Stories By Dare Obasanjo
Dare Obasanjo is a Program Manager at Microsoft where he works on the Contacts team. The Contacts team provides back-end support for Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Spaces, Windows Live Expo, and related services. Obasanjo is also known for RSS Bandit, a popular .NET-based RSS reader.
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OpenSocial 11/06/07 04:53:58 AM EST | |||
nothing more than another networking service that is consumed by multiple web application |
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bugzpodder 11/05/07 10:58:33 AM EST | |||
Excellent post! Thank you! |
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As more enterprises are adopting clouds, the nature of cloud computing is changing. Previously, clouds were used to test applications or for non-mission critical applications. Today, enterprises are using clouds for cost-saving advantages and launching more mission critical applications that have defined performance needs.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Shepcaro, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Telx, will discuss how distributed computing has many advantages. It wou...
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