The ELC Community Blog

A knowledge exchange on Ruby on Rails and Agile Development

OpenSocial and Ruby

by Ryan Garver on November 06, 2007

OpenSocial was released late in the evening on Thursday, November 1st with much fanfare. MySpace is now boasting an API, as does Orkutt, and LinkedIn among many others. This is great! Facebook has revolutionized social widgets with the release of their API. Its exciting to see the possibility of expanding the coverage of these widgets across all of the major (and minor) networks. ELC Technologies will be investing quite a bit of time towards developing a Ruby implementation of the OpenSocial set of standards. Expect a first draft of a gem and a Rails plugin by the end of the week.

Josh and I started working on the standard based on the documentation that Google released. They have 4 general APIs that they have pulled together under the OpenSocial banner. The JavaScript API specifies how to build widgets using the same constructs as used in Google Gadgets. The People and Friends data API describes methods for retrieving information about different user's profile along with their friends information. The Activities data API supports reading and updating a users activities and reading their friend's activities. The Persistence data API allows for the manipulation of key/value pairs on a OpenSocial compatible network.

Originally posted on RAG on Rails.