OpenSocial, a standard programming model for the Social Web

OpenSocial is an Open Standard defining a set of common APIs that work on many different social websites, including MySpace, Plaxo, Hi5, Ning, orkut, Salesforce.com and LinkedIn, among others. This allows developers to learn one API, then write a social application for any of those sites, reaching over 200M+ users in dozens of countries: Learn once, write anywhere.

Because it’s built on web standards like HTML and JavaScript, developers don’t have to learn a custom programming language.

OpenSocial exposes 3 APIs: People, Persistence and Activities. These APIs are exposed as Javascript and REST APIs.

OpenSocial is an open specification: any website maintaining a social network can implement it and become an OpenSocial container.

In order to make it easier for developers of social sites to implement the API and make their site am OpenSocial container, the open source Apache Shindig project will provide reference implementations for OpenSocial containers in several languages (Java, PHP). Shindig will define a language specific Service Provider Interface (SPI) that a social site can implement to connect Shindig to People, Persistence and Activities backend services for the social site. Shindig will then expose these services as OpenSocial Javascript API, and as REST Atom/AtomPub/GData APIs.

In this session we will explain what OpenSocial is, show examples of OpenSocial containers and applications, demonstrate how to create an OpenSocial application, and explain how to leverage Apache Shindig in order to implement an OpenSocial container.