IFPC and other JavaScript functionality contributed to Apache Shindig

Posted by John Hjelmstad, Software Engineer

To help bootstrap Shindig, we’ve been heads down over the past few weeks working to contribute more JavaScript functionality to Shindig’s Gadget Container JavaScript (for background about Shindig, please check the first commit post). In addition, to provide a cleaner API, you’ll notice that these new functions are in the gadgets.* JavaScript namespace, though, for backwards-compatability's sake, all the classic gadgets APIs are still supported as well. As discussed in the group, this is a continuation of the contributions of what’s been powering iGoogle.

So, what functionality did we add to the Shindig repository?

• IFPC (Inter-Frame Procedure Call) -- A library facilitating communication between the container and gadgets.
• Utility JavaScript -- Well-known convenience functions (e.g. shortcuts for getElementById).
• Fetchers -- Includes content fetching through gadgets.io.makeRequest (formerly known as _IG_FetchContent) for both JSON and XML, and wraps XmlHttpRequest and in-server proxies.
• User Prefs -- Functions implemented to get and set (read and write) user preferences, which are simply key/value pairs.

Next, beyond iterating on feature development in the open repository, we'll be continuing to contribute code to Shindig to reach feature parity with existing gadget containers, like iGoogle, and optimizing server performance.

Go ahead and check out the code, send any feedback to the shindig-dev@incubator.apache.org mailing list on what you'd like to see added, and bugs can be filed in the issue tracker (note: you'll need a JIRA account to file issues, but anyone can get an account).

Update: The last paragraph has been updated to direct feedback to Shindig's mailing list and the Apache issue tracker.