Let's get this Shindig started

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager

We're thrilled to tell you the initial commit to the Shindig repository is in. This is the first of many steps towards providing infrastructure for those wishing to host OpenSocial apps on their websites. In case you didn't see it last time, Shindig is a new project in the Apache Software Foundation's incubator (as per the formal proposal) that aims to provide an open source reference implementation of the entire OpenSocial stack -- Shindig's goal is to allow new sites to start hosting social apps in well under an hour's worth of work.

For those of you who aren't yet familiar with the open source world, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is a vibrant open source community that promotes collaborative, consensus based development in an effort to produce high quality software. Several of the companies and individuals building support for OpenSocial have joined the ASF's Shindig incubator project to work -- in the open -- on a full implementation of OpenSocial. Today's commit is the first step towards that implementation; it includes a reference server and sample code that lets anyone add a few lines of JavaScript to a web page and display arbitrary gadgets. This initial contribution is based upon code that has been powering Google Gadgets and iGoogle for the past few years and is meant to bootstrap the Shindig project. Keep reading if you're interested in more technical details and the next steps.

As an introduction, the components of Shindig can be broken down as follows:

• Gadget Container JavaScript -- core JavaScript foundation for general gadget functionality (read more about gadget functionality). This JavaScript manages security, communication, UI layout, and feature extensions, such as the OpenSocial API.


• Gadget Server -- an open source version of gmodules.com, which is used to render the gadget xml into JavaScript and HTML for the container to expose via the container JavaScript.


• OpenSocial Container JavaScript -- JavaScript environment that sits on top of the Gadget Container JS and provides OpenSocial specific functionality (profiles, friends, activities).


• OpenSocial Gateway Server -- an open source implementation of the server interface to container-specific information, including the OpenSocial REST APIs, with clear extension points so others can connect it to their own backends.

This commit represents initial versions of the first two components, the Gadget Container JavaScript and the Gadget Server -- the latter written in Java. The Gadget Container JavaScript provides code to generate IFRAMES pointing to gmodules.com, offers some basic gadgets functionality (e.g. dynamic height), a layout manager, the edit dialog box, a cookie-based user preferences store, and an option to point IFRAMES at your Gadget Server instance instead of gmodules.com. The initial Gadget Server provides extensible scaffolding for processing gadgets: retrieving XML, parsing it, and processing it into a form that allows rendering of the gadget to a user or retrieval of its metadata.

While this initial commit hasn't been fully tested for production-level traffic, we'll be iterating on these issues in the coming weeks with the input of the open source community. Future development on the first two components will occur in the public repository, hosted in the Apache incubator. The latter two components will be coming into Shindig as OpenSocial evolves. For now, you can find the latest reference for the OpenSocial Container JavaScript in the mock container sample, which is also covered by the Apache 2.0 license.

Shindig's success, like that of all Apache Software Foundation projects, depends on the diverse community of people working on and using it. While the initial contribution of the Gadget Server was written in Java, Shindig is language neutral. Ning is planning to contribute an initial version of a PHP Gadget Server, and we've heard rumors of C#, Perl, and Ruby.

If you're interested to get started with the code, please review the README doc, to check out the source, and get your own service running.

This is the first of many steps in the evolution of Shindig, OpenSocial, and gadgets. We'd love your feedback.