The current generation of social applications has become increasingly interesting and attractive, with many apps sporting fancy animation effects and complex user interactions. One exciting result of this trend is the growing number of ActionScript developers in the community.
To support the development of OpenSocial apps using ActionScript, we are happy to introduce a new client library which exposes almost all of the OpenSocial v0.8 JavaScript APIs in native ActionScript 3 for Flash and Flex gadget developers. The library provides an event-driven development model that is prevalent in the ActionScript community, a FlexUnit-based testing framework, and samples for both Flash and Flex environments. We hope the library will ease the learning curve for ActionScript developers and shorten the development cycle. To check out the code, point your browsers to the Source tab linked from the ActionScript Client Library project page.
This library is completely open sourced under the Apache 2.0 license, and contributions are not only welcomed, but encouraged. In addition to a wiki page explaining the patch submission process, this project hosts an issue tracker which will be populated with known issues and requested enhancements. This tracker is the best place to start if you're interested in contributing to the project. Please use the tracker to report any new bugs or incompatibilities you find, or to request new features. You can also 'star' feature requests reported by other developers if they are significant to your own development. This will help us prioritize which bugs or features to work on next. Also, you are welcome to join the client library discussion forum and post your questions and feedback. We look forward to seeing you there!
A new addition to the OpenSocial family - the ActionScript3 client library!
Monday, June 29, 2009 at 9:26:00 AM
Why Enterprise Software Provider Atlassian Chose OpenSocial
Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 2:29:00 PM
Hi, I'm Mark Halvorson the "Chief Imagineer" at Atlassian Software. Whenever I tell people my title it is usually received in one of two ways - a chuckle and a blank stare, or for those in the know some comment about Walt Disney. No, I don't make rides for an amusement park, but I do get to imagine inventive ways to combine thorny, enterprise challenges with some of the exciting things happening on the consumer web. That is why I'm particularly excited to blog in this forum about how Atlassian is bringing OpenSocial to the Enterprise.
Enterprise, meet OpenSocial
Much like "Imagineer" makes you think Walt Disney when you hear OpenSocial, you are likely thinking: Orkut, MySpace, and other Internet social networks. When we heard OpenSocial we thought: now there's some cool technology we can use to bring our portfolio closer together, and closer to lots of great stuff on the Internet.
Atlassian is a seven-year young software company, hailing from Australia, and building collaboration and productivity tools for developers and teams. Many of you may of come across two of our better known products: JIRA, an issue tracker, and Confluence, an enterprise wiki. The rest of the portfolio includes a series of developer tools: FishEye, for exploring source code on the web; Crucible, for peer code review; Bamboo, a continuous integration server; and Clover, for test coverage analysis. We also offer Studio, which combines several of these products into a hosted integrated development suite.
Development is a social activity
Development is social. Developers work in teams, often with other non-developers like product managers and technical writers. Those teams work together on a variety of shared objects: specifications, tasks, documentation, source code, builds and projects. Each of those shared objects generate lots of activity: comments, subtasks, notifications of changes and edits, build failures, code commits. These teams use lots of different tools and systems: wikis, bug trackers, build automation systems, source code repositories. That's a huge internal social network. People working with people, people working with systems, and systems working with systems - a river of activity that needs to funnel to the people who care about it most. Our mission is to help developers collaborate and communicate easier, and in the process help them write higher quality code faster.
Okay, so why OpenSocial?
With eight products that support various parts of the development process, each with their own dashboard, and each spitting off data and activity that the others could benefit from, OpenSocial gave us an inventive, proven integration pattern: gadgets . We've embraced OpenSocial gadgets as a method of integration between our own products and between other enterprise software, and we're using OpenSocial gadgets as a mechanism to inject functionality and information from our products into other OpenSocial-compliant containers on the Internet, like Gmail or iGoogle.
JIRA 4.0 will be the first OpenSocial container in our portfolio to ship. JIRA has implemented OpenSocial through Shindig as a series of Atlassian plugins, which we call the Atlassian Gadgets plugins. JIRA produces Gadgets that can be displayed by other OpenSocial-compliant containers, including iGoogle and Gmail, and authentication between Gadget producers and consumers is handled through OAuth. We're excited about the possibilities. JIRA dashboards can now quickly assemble build status from Bamboo, project updates from Confluence, assigned code reviews from Crucible, all in the context of the issues and tasks assigned to a developer in the context of a JIRA project. Are you a team lead, and spend most of your time in Gmail? No problem, take all of that same information and park it there, so it's right alongside your inbox.
We've launched a little site that talks more about what we're doing at http://www.atlassian.com/opensocial. You can also follow us on twitter http://twitter.com/atlassian. I hope to do more blogging here about things we learn and cool stuff we're experimenting with. In the meantime, here's short video of how a dev manager, who may live in Gmail, can file issues and track the state of projects and builds using Atlassian Gadgets in Gmail.
Check out these videos and slides from Google I/O
Wednesday, June 10, 2009 at 12:22:00 PM
If you weren't able to make it to Google I/O, or if you're looking for a refresher on one of the sessions you saw, the Google I/O site now has videos of all the social sessions so everyone can watch and learn. From design principles to saving on bandwidth and hosting costs, you're sure to learn something new about how to improve your OpenSocial app. You can find a summary of all the social sessions in this post on the Google Code blog, but here's the list:
- Google and the Social Web
- Building a Business with Social Apps
- Designing OpenSocial Apps for Speed and Scale
- The Social Web: An Implementor's Guide
- Powering Mobile Apps with Social Data
- Google Friend Connect In The Real World
- OpenSocial in the Enterprise
- Beyond Cut & Paste: Deep integrations with Google Friend Connect
- Google Friend Connect Gadgets: Best Practices in Code and Interaction Design
Hi5 launches hi5 Coins payment platform using OpenSocial Virtual Currency API
Tuesday, June 02, 2009 at 8:57:00 AM
Ever since launching our OpenSocial platform in March 2008, developers have been eager for a unified payment platform for collecting micro-transactions on hi5. Over the past year, we have moved ahead to make such a virtual currency platform available to developers while ensuring a positive user experience for our members. Over the last few weeks, hi5 has been launching our first third-party games integrated via OpenSocial-compliant APIs to our virtual currency platform – providing a standard payment method for developers to monetize their applications through our audience of over 60 million active users around the world.
The first step in this progression was the launch of our virtual currency back in December 2008, which allowed users to buy hi5 Coins and use them to purchase virtual goods on the site. This platform was initially accessible only for hi5 premium features like Gifts. We rapidly expanded the ways that users could get real currency into the system – going beyond credit/debit cards to include payment methods, such as mobile SMS, offers and alternate cards, like Ultimate Game cards, that are popular in different parts of the world.
The next step was to make our payments interface OpenSocial compliant. In order to make our virtual currency more universal across hi5 and non-hi5 applications, our OpenSocial platform team collaborated with other containers to propose an OpenSocial Virtual Currency API as an extension to the OpenSocial specification. Our virtual currency interface was expedited due to the work started by other OpenSocial containers like Xiaonei.com, 51.com, and Netlog.com. With real use cases from Asia, Europe and Latin America, the containers quickly converged on the API specifications.
The hi5 OpenSocial Virtual Currency interface is already live in public beta with several third-party developers like RockYou (RockYou Pets), Playdom (Poker Palace) and Small Worlds, enabling them to collect direct user payments within their games. We have a number of additional partnerships that will launch soon. OpenSocial developers can now leverage a standard virtual currency spec across containers – allowing them to monetize through micro-transactions without worrying about the details of payment processing, currency conversions, localized payment methods or other logistical challenges. Our users benefit, as well, with more outlets for spending their hi5 Coins and a simplified and familiar process for making payments on the hi5 site. We look forward to continuing to work with the OpenSocial community to innovate on the virtual currency standard and to make micro-transactions between users and developers a viable and growing revenue stream.
