An Introduction to OpenSocial version 0.9

OpenSocial helps people do more things with the people they know anywhere on the web by providing developers with a rich, flexible platform for building social applications that can run on many sites. OpenSocial v0.9, the newest version of the specification, aims to make application development, testing, and deployment easier and faster, while reducing the learning curve for new app developers.

Here is an overview of the new features in OpenSocial v0.9:

How streamlined is the new JavaScript API?  With OpenSocial v0.8, this is how an application requests information about the user viewing a webpage:

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

Here is the same request in version 0.9:

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

Proxied Content

• Converting existing web applications into OpenSocial apps requires fewer steps
• Containers can sanitize content before rendering to protect against phishing and XSS attacks.
• Fewer roundtrips means lower latency, especially when combined with data pipelining

Data Pipelining

The first time an OpenSocial application loads, it often retrieves social data from the container using a DataRequest and then sends that data to remote servers using a makeRequest.  This requires many steps, and because the container must load the app's IFrame before the app can begin making requests, the end user may be left staring at a 'Loading...' message for longer than necessary.