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Wed

14

May

2008

Preliminary Research and Discussion
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OpenSocial
Written by Shannon Quinn   

...while listening to the Master and Commander soundtrack.  Glorious.

First, I apologize for lack of content in the last two weeks.  Exams + a busy family schedule over my one week of vacation will do that.  Bet on a deluge of blogging from now until forever.

I have spoken a bit with my wonderful mentor Amy, and will very soon get in touch with chalet16, the mastermind behind the integration of the Facebook API with Joomla! (sorry I haven't gotten in touch with you yet; I keep seeing you appear on Skype right before I head off to sleep :P).  Amy presented me with an excellent idea, one which would extend the scope of the OpenSocial project as it is now to encompass more than just a single application:

Rather than simply doing with OpenSocial what chalet16 is doing with Facebook, develop a framework on which OpenSocial applications - any application! - can run within a Joomla! website.  And vice versa: Joomla! OpenSocial applications can run within any OpenSocial-powered social networking website.

It's ambitious, but entirely doable.  Provided the necessary research and project planning gets done.

Extending the Joomla! functionality will not be the difficult part.  Aside from the boatloads of brilliant people in this very community, the CMS itself is extremely robust and extensible by design.  It will simply be a matter of finding the pertinant documentation and getting my feet wet.  The difficulty will be in assessing the OpenSocial functionality and determining how to plug that into the existing Joomla! framework.  There are troves of OpenSocial documentation on Google's website, most of which I have already printed out and paged through.

I realize this post is somewhat short on technical details; don't worry, I'll get there as I experiment.

Ideally, I would like to coordinate my development efforts with chalet16 and try to synchronize the application architecture, as my original GSoC proposal called for normalizing the varying social APIs into a unified system.  Hopefully, through careful planning and communication, we can design our respective extensions while keeping the ultimate goal of unification possible upon the conclusion of the summer.

Questions?  Comments?  Complaints?  Criticisms?  Chocolate? :P

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3 Comments

  1. Pete makes this comment

    Hi Nice read here, just discovered a 'new' Google service namend friendconnect, maybe this could also be considered in your Plans Cheers Pete

    Wed 14 May 2008 04:28:53 EDT

  2. Amy Stephen makes this comment

    How about fear? :| And, of course, chocolate! OK. This is ambitious. Perhaps it would be a good idea to pick one side of this equation? Either work on creating an extension that allows J! to host OpenSocial apps that can also interact with the J! database -- or to focus on creating a nice J! development environment for the purpose of creating OpenSocial apps that run in Okrut, ning, plaxo, MySpace, Facebook, etc. I can see it coming together but that's a lot for this summer, I think. It'll be great having Chalet's involvement, given his experience with FB. Now, we just need to get him to sleep during normal hours. ;-) This project holds promise. Let's get a good deliverable and start towards the future without overloading you this summer. I can see you like a challenge and that rocks! I think your work is going to make some J! sites very exciting this fall.

    Wed 14 May 2008 12:20:26 EDT

  3. Shannon Quinn makes this comment

    @Pete: Thanks for the link! I've checked out that service, and it's *definitely* pertinent to what I'll be doing. I'm going to try and get signed up as a developer on their site and make use of its resources in this project. Thanks so much for the tip! @Amy: I do agree that it's very ambitious, but from what I'm gathering in my research, it seems like one side of that equation lends itself to the other pretty naturally; in fact, it almost seems like trying to separate the two will induce a greater level of overall difficulty, rather than simplify the project. Plus, with Chalet's FB experience, I think we could really streamline this project to integrate efficiently on the J! end of things. I'd like to keep planning over the course of this weekend and stay in touch with you, and we'll see what we've fleshed out come early next week.

    Sat 17 May 2008 00:29:40 EDT

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