Hosting OpenSocial Apps

Your website can host third party OpenSocial apps integrated with your site's social network. A site that can host OpenSocial apps is called an OpenSocial container. The basic requirements for containers are detailed in the OpenSocial API Specification.

OpenSocial apps typically include gadgets, so you will need to provide a way to allow a user to add gadgets to their page. You can provide your own directory, link to hand-picked URLs, and/or allow users to add gadgets by URL. Gadgets are typically implemented as individual iframes within your containing page.

To host OpenSocial apps, your website must implement the OpenSocial API Specification. In most cases, this means that you connect your own social network's backends to the OpenSocial Service Provider Interface (SPI), which is part of Shindig, to allow an OpenSocial app to access your site's data. However, it is possible to use data from another social network as well, should you prefer. The SPI implements:

• Adding and removing friends
• Adding and removing apps
• Storing activities
• Retrieving activity streams for self and friends
• Storing and retrieving per-app and per-app-per-user data

Getting Started with Shindig

In order to streamline the process for hosting OpenSocial apps, a new Apache incubator project, known as Shindig, has been created. Apache Shindig is an open source project that contains code that you can plug into your server's infrastructure and begin hosting OpenSocial apps relatively quickly. Shindig essentially serves as a reference implementation of the OpenSocial stack and its goal is to let a new website start hosting social applications with only a modest amount of effort. For the latest on Shindig, please visit the Apache Shindig website. There you'll find information on how to checkout and build your own Shindig server as well as how to contribute to Shindig.

For a high-level overview of Shindig also see this blog post. To discuss how to implement your own OpenSocial container in a collaborative fashion, please visit the Implementing OpenSocial Containers discussion within the OpenSocial developer forum.

OpenSocial Container Compliance Testing

You can use the OpenSocial Compliance Test Gadget to see if your site complies with the OpenSocial specification. The test gadget reports compliance at 3 levels: a required level and two optional levels.