April 23, 2009

OpenSocial Spec 0.9 is published


Opensocial 0.9 spec is published on Apr 16 according to OpenSocial API blog (http://blog.opensocial.org/2009/04/opensocial-community-defines-version-09.html)
 
 
major features:
1. lightweight javascript API
2. proxied content  
3. data pipelining
4. templates and OSML
 

1. Lightweight javascript API will be a great news for developers.  I have blogged earlier about how cumbersome the JS API is.  Lightweight javascript API is a great improvement.  

eg.  examples coming from OpenSocial Release Notes:

Requesting the viewer in OpenSocial v0.8

var req = opensocial.newDataRequest(); req.add(req.newFetchPersonRequest(opensocial.DataRequest.PersonId.OWNER), "req"); req.send(callback); 

Requesting the viewer in OpenSocial v0.9

osapi.people.getViewer().execute(callback);

Once that Orkut and Myspace support lightweight javascript api in Spec 0.9.  I think we shall change our opensocial-actionscript-client interface to follow lightweight javascript api.  Right now, our interface mimics the regular javascript api in OpenSocial Spec 0.8.  

2. templates - people who are familiar with JSP EL will find this to be very similar.  This should make the code more readable.

3. OSML - each containers will be required to implement a set of standard tags such as Name Badge.  This is another timesaver.