Type 101

OpenSocial is an open specification defining a common API that works 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: Learn once, write anywhere. In addition, in order to make it easier for developers of social sites to implement the API and make their site an OpenSocial container, the Apache project Shindig provides reference implementations for OpenSocial containers in two 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 and REST 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.

Dan Peterson

Dan Peterson is a product manager on Google's developer team, focusing on OpenSocial and Shindig. Previously, Dan led the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) team during the transition to becoming an open source project and worked on Google's infrastructure team on web search and datacenter management. Dan earned a B.S. Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as minors in Technology & Management and philosophy.