1. OpenSocial Gadgets
& Eclipse
Benjamin Cabé
<bcabe@sierrawireless.com
>

3. What is OpenSocial?
• Open Specification
– 1.0 version released in March
– Many companies involved
• Lightweight web components
• Modularity in mind
• Social features

4. Write once, run anywhere 
• Many social networking sites are OpenSocial
compatible
– MySpace, Hi5, LinkedIn, iGoogle, Orkut…
• Eclipse
– e4 team working on an OpenSocial
implementation too

5. Enterprise usage
• Many enterprise-oriented gadgets
– Calendar, To-Do List, Map, Doodle, …
– Atlassian provides gadgets for JIRA metrics
• Bringing OpenSocial support into an existing
application is not that hard
– Existing web apps: Apache Shindig
– Rich client apps: e4!
• “Social Enterprise”

6. Social, you said?
• Many APIs to crawl user’s social network
• Data model
– Person (friends, groups, tastes, …)
• AppData for each gadget
– Activities (music being listened, …)
– Messages, Albums, …

8. Gadget/module definition
• XML file
– Metadata
– Dependencies
– Application implementation
• In-line HTML / CSS / JavaScript
• or URL to external definition (a la IFRAME)

9. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Module>
<ModulePrefs title="Hello, world!«
author="Benjamin Cabé">
<Require feature="opensocial-0.8"/>
</ModulePrefs>
<Content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<script type="text/javascript">
function init() {
$("handler").innerHTML = "Hello, world."
;
}
gadgets.util.registerOnLoadHandler(function() {
init();
});
</script>
<div id="handler"></div>
]]>
</Content>
</Module>

10. Core Gadget API
• gadgets.flash
• gadgets.io
• gadgets.json
• gadgets.MiniMess
age
• gadgets.Prefs
• gadgets.pubsub
• gadgets.rpc
• gadgets.skins
• gadgets.Tab
• gadgets.TabSet
• gadgets.util
• gadgets.views
• gadgets.window

11. The simple way…
• Stand-alone HTML/JS/CSS in your preferred
editor
• Worry about gadget.xml later
– Debug made easier
• Wrap in gadget.xml at the very end
– “url” content-type => IFRAME

12. OpenSocial
Development Environment
• Built-in Shindig server for local testing
• Forms editor for the gadget definition
• Social data handling (embedded database)
• Testing
– Easy iGoogle deployment
– Performance testing with Firefox

14. Why?
• Deploy existing gadgets into views
• … and develop new ones leveraging Eclipse
services
– Only HTML, CSS & Javascript
– Not mandatory to know the Eclipse API
– OpenSocial spec fits quite well in Eclipse
architecture
– De-facto self-hosting

15. Collaborative development
• Make e4 « social-aware »
– Communicate with co-workers
– Share information (project, code snippets) with
your social network
– Share gadgets themselves (« Coworker John
suggests you to add the XYZ gadget »)

17. Implementation overview
• HTML rendering: SWT Browser widget
• Since 3.5, the Browser is on steroids:
– Browser#evaluate(String) allows
evaluation of arbitrary JavaScript from your Java
code
– BrowserFunction allows to have Java
implementation for JavaScript functions

18. Implementation overview
• Modules express dependencies towards features
– Extension point to register new OpenSocial features in
the container
– OSGi Resolver to solve constraints expressed by a
Module
• Available features in the container: mapped to Bundles
• Features required by a module: Require-Bundle
directives
• Eclipse specific APIs exposed through
the e4 OpenSocial feature

19. Plan
• Create bridges to more Eclipse Application
Services
• Merge some of recent investigations made in
http://github.com/kartben
• ATF integration (JS/CSS debugging support)
• Social REST APIs directly exposed by ECF

20. Questions?

21. Further reading
• http://www.opensocial.org
• http://wiki.opensocial.org/index.php?title=JavaScript_API_Reference
• http://shindig.apache.org/
• https://sites.google.com/site/opensocialdevenv/
• http://borisoneclipse.blogspot.com/2009/11/opensocial-igoogle-gadgets-in-eclipse.html