Early container sample available

Posted by Cassie Doll, Software Engineer

As promised in the last post, we've just released an open source container sample. It's an early version, but should give you some idea of the Service Provider Interface (SPI) we will provide to any website which wants to host OpenSocial gadgets. This sample stores all of its data in memory, which allows you write a mock implementation of anything you want. While this does let you get your feet wet with the SPI, it does not provide adequate security for production, and should only be used for internal testing and demonstrations.

One of our most important goals for the SPI is that it's easy for new websites to become an OpenSocial container. With that in mind the current SPI only requires that you implement one javascript file: container.js. So if you want to start exploring, all you need to do is download the code in this release, change it to use data from your own backend servers, and you can have a demo ready to go.

Now don't forget that this is only version 0.5 of the API, so do not consider it stable. The overall architecture will remain the same, but we will improve it based on feedback wherever we can. We'll also add real security, app isolation, and other helpful things as part of the real development kit when that's released.

That said, please jump in and let us know how it goes. We're looking for feedback.