Recently, I've realised that I have not implemented the deserialization methods for the OpenSocial API for pesta. I found out while trying to deserialize Google Friend Connect data. Oops. I guess my memory is not as good as it used to be. I found out that the DataContractSerializer is not effective when some fields are missing in the JSON string. So I finally implemented the Deserialize method fo... [More]

Finally managed to get pesta running under Windows Azure. It wasn't too difficult actually. The July CTP of Windows Azure SDK supported MVC projects as a web role out of the box. No hacking necessary. However, when I first got it running, pesta did not seem to inject the javascript libraries and gadgets were not rendered properly. It turns out that when deploying the MVC project, the CloudService... [More]

I have just managed to do a server-side integration of Google Friend Connect on raya. It took awhile to do this mainly because I realised that the deserialization mechanism has not been implemented properly. So in the end I did a quick custom javascript deserializer for JSON objects in pesta. Information on how to support Google Friend Connect can be found here. Basically, there are three ways yo... [More]

For someone new to OpenSocial and are thinking of developing a gadget for OpenSocial. The following is a good article on how data requests works in OpenSocial,  Requesting Data in OpenSocial. There are other useful articles as well on the site so have a look around.  

Raya 0.2.2 addresses the following issues since the release of Raya 0.2 edit profile button only shown for owner fix exception when composing new message clear facebook connect cookies on invalid session key fix delete button in apps gallery remove unused files set username session value for facebook connect logins fixed exception on failed login Internal widgets Included since the ... [More]

Raya 0.2 has been released. What's new with this release  New User Interface Raya has been given a new look. Yes it does look a little like facebook but expect the UI to evolve more in the near future. OpenID support Allows users to login using their OpenID, Yahoo!ID, Google Account. Internal widgets Allows the creation of internal OpenSocial widgets. Included is an OpenSocial widget to... [More]

The following are some articles on how to get OpenSocial running in the cloud. The examples are for running in the cloud with Google App Engine and Amazon S3 and are based on Python. OpenSocial in the Cloud Building an OpenSocial App with Google App Engine    

Recently, I was wondering whether it was possible to obtain the gadget specifications for Google Friend Connect gadgets. After digging for awhile, the urls from the XML specifications for these gadgets are available from http://www.google.com/friendconnect/script/friendconnect.js. The following are the gadget specs that are linked to within the javascript files. http://www.google.com/friendcon... [More]

It has been awhile since my last post. Initially, I was looking into getting pesta working on Windows Azure. While at it, I thought I might as well upgrade it to support OpenSocial 0.9. And then while upgrading it, I looked into simplifying the serialization and deserialization of the various OpenSocial data representations for the REST API.  Previously, the serialization process to and from... [More]

Partuza is an example of an OpenSocial site using Shindig. It is based on PHP. The following describes my experience getting Partuza running under IIS 7.0 on Windows Vista. For a guide getting Partuza running using Apache, please refer here. The article assumes that you have read the previous article on running Shindig PHP on IIS and have a running IIS that supports PHP applications. Becaus... [More]