Blogging Roller

ApacheConUS 2009 registration open, sign up now!

2009-08-11T20:09:21+00:00

The early-bird special ends on August 14, so you'd better get moving.

Sign up for ApacheCon US by 14 August and save up to $500!

This year's ApacheCon US promises to deliver our most extensive program to date, and largest anticipated gathering of the global Apache community to celebrate the ASF's milestone 10th Anniversary. The San Francisco Bay Area is where the very first ASF official user conference was held, and we hope that you will join us in celebrating the ASF's success!

Apache members, code contributors, users, developers, system administrators, business managers, service providers, and vendors will convene 2-6 November in Oakland, California, for a week of training, presentations, sharing and hacking. ApacheCon US 2009 features new content tracks, MeetUps, and GetTogethers, as well as a number of events open to the public free of charge, such as the Hackathon and 2-day BarCampApache, in appreciation of their support over the past decade.

Be sure to register by 14 August to save up to $500! To sign up, visit http://www.us.apachecon.com

I'll be there and speaking on the topic of What's New in Roller 5.0. I also plan to attend the Social and Widgets Meetup with folks from Shindig, SocialSite and Wookie. I hope to see you there.

The future of Project SocialSite: Apache?

2009-03-27T13:17:27+00:00

Since January, the future of https://socialsite.dev.java.net">Project SocialSite has been in the hands of the SocialSite community. During that time, I continued working on the project almost because I think it's got great potential and I would really like to see it live on in some form. That's also why I continued to talk to Sun about the project.

Today, I'm very happy to announce that Sun Microsystems is willing to contribute Project SocialSite to the Apache Software Foundation. It's not clear whether SocialSite should be contributed into Shindig or as a new incubator project, but either way I think this is the best thing for the project and will give it the best possible chances for building a thriving community. I've started some discussions about this on Apache-private mailing lists and I'll let you know what happens next.

This post brings to an end my series of posts about Shindig for blogs and wikis. Here are links to the earlier posts:

By the way, I delivered my Shindig talk just a couple of minutes ago. It was well-attended and I think it went pretty well. You can find the slides online at the ApacheCon EU 2009 site here: http://www.eu.apachecon.com/c/aceu2009/sessions/184">Shindig for Blogs and Wikis. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming...

Upcoming: Shindig for Blogs and Wikis, ApacheCon EU

2009-01-21T15:39:46+00:00

The other day I got the happy news that my one of my proposed sessions was accepted for ApacheCon EU. ApacheCon and Amsterdam are definitely among my favorite places to be, so I'm thrilled. You ought to go too; here's the information on the conference, which will include training, the hackathon and a BarCamp.

ApacheCon Europe 2009 (link)

23-27 March 2009 | MÃ¶venpick Hotel, Amsterdam
Pricing (register before Feb 6 for discount)

My session is titled <a href="http://www.eu.apachecon.com/c/aceu2009/sessions/184 ">Shindig for Blogs and Wikis. I'll cover different approaches to adding social features to blogs and wikis and I'll zoom-in on OpenSocial related options Shindig and Project SocialSite. Here's the abstract, with some formatting that is missing from the ApacheCon site:

Blogs, wikis and feeds helped to make the web more social by making it easy for folks to read, write and have conversations on the web; and now social networking technologies are making the web and even more social.

In this session you'll learn about OpenSocial, a new standard for interacting with social networking data via Web Service and via JavaScript Gadgets that can be embedded into social networking sites. You'll learn about Apache Shindig (incubating), which is the reference implementation of OpenSocial, and how it can be used to add support for social networking and gadgets to existing web applications and specifically Apache Roller and Apache JSPWiki. The session will cover:

Quick introduction to OpenSocial and Shindig

Overview of products/services that leverage OpenSocial

Benefits of social networking in blogs and wikis

How to support Google Gadgets in Roller and JSPWiki via Shindig

How to enable social features in Roller and JSPWiki via Shindig

How to add comprensive social graph support to Roller and JSPWiki via SocialSite

How to create an OpenSocial Applications that access Roller and JSPWiki

I'm already working on the demos and slides for this as it's going to be quite a bit of work. Fortunately, I'll be able to recycle some of the material in some other upcoming gigs.

re: Shindig/Java internals

2008-09-24T08:59:09+00:00

If you want more on Shindig/Java internals, then check this out. Rajdeep Dua has written a very detailed article on the topic and he is asking for feedback: Overview of REST Implementation in Shindig - Java Version.

Shindig/Java internals diagram updated

2008-09-23T16:09:52+00:00

A lot has changed since I did my first and even my second "how does Shindig/Java work" diagram. Believe it or not, there are now two separate web services protocols in OpenSocial and thus in Shindig. I'll explain that and then I'll share my updated diagram and synopsis of Shindig/Java internals.

NOTE: this post covers the social API implementation only and not the Gadget server portions of Shindig.

Here's what happened. There was a long discussion on the OpenSocial spec mailing list about the merits of REST vs. RPC for the OpenSocial web services APIs (e.g. here and here). I'm not going to characterize the two sides as the JavaScripty Gadgeteers and the XML-smokin' RESTafarians because that would be just plain silly. Long story short, neither side really "won" and so the latest rev 0.8.1 of OpenSocial includes two separate web services protocols:

The OpenSocial REST API, which is based on AtomPub but with support for XML and JSON formats in addition to Atom format XML. There is no support for batching of operations. (There was a proposal for RESTful batching, but it did not gain consensus.)
The OpenSocial JSON-RPC API where methods are called by HTTP POSTing JSON data and there is full support for batching of operations.

Seems a pity to have two separate protocols that serve essentially the same purpose, but thankfully there are a lot of similarities. For example, the JSON-RPC protocol methods are GET, POST, PUT and DELETE. And the JSON format used in the JSON-RPC protocol matches the one in the REST API. That makes things a little easier for implementers and if you use Shindig as the basis for your social network's OpenSocial implementation, it's even easier -- you implement one set of interfaces and you get support for both REST and JSON-RPC. Next, I'll explain how that works with my updated diagram:

And I'll explain by walking through the processing of one request; here's the walk-through (new stuff is highlighted in yellow:

1... A request enters Shindig via either the DataServiceServlet at /social/rest or the JsonRpcServlet at /social/rpc, which has a map of DataRequestHandlers (which it got from the HandlerProvider) keyed by the route that each handles. It's also got a pair of bean converters, which will come into play later when we need to convert outgoing POJOs to XML or JSON representation.

2... The Servlet creates a RequestItem, which parses the request for easy access later. The request item also has a pair of converters which can be used to convert incoming XML or JSON data into Java POJOs.

There are two different request items, one for REST RestfulRequestItem and one for RPC RpcRequestItem. The RESTful request item parses the incoming URL for parameters and treats data from a POST or PUT as typed data, to be automatically converted from JSON, XML or Atom into a Java POJO object from the SPI.

In the RPC case, everything is a POST and the request item grabs its parameters and the typed payload from the JSON object that was posted to the server.

3... The Servlet calls the appropriate handlers. If the request is a single request, then the Servlet looks up a DataRequestHandler based on the request's "route" (i.e. the first segment of URL's pathinfo). The Servlet calls the selected handler, hands it a request item. If the request is a batch request then the Servlet does the same as above, but in a loop collecting request items.

4... One of Shindig's three request handlers then handles the request and returns a ResponseItem or (plural) items containing the Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs) to be returned to the called. This is the point where incoming XML or JSON data is de-serialized to POJO form by a call to requestItem.getTypedParameter(). Shinding provides three DataRequestHandlers:

PersonHandler: returns Person objects with detailed profile information
ActivtyHandler: returns Activities of people or group, allows activity creation
AppDataHandler: returns Gadget data, allows Gadets to store data

NOTE: If want to add your own REST/RPC APIs to extend Shindig, as we are doing in SocialSite, you can do it by hooking in your own handlers. Use Guice dependency injection to hook in your own custom HandlerProvider, one that returns your own custom handlers.

5... The Shindig handlers call the Shindig Service Provider (SPI), which is defined by a set of interfaces with methods that return ResponseItems. There is a set of model objects, aka POJOS, shown in green that represent the different data types that can be returned by the REST or RPC APIs. The service implementations return these POJO objects and expect the Shindig infrastructure to automatically map POJO to either JSON or XML as appropriate.

PersonService: returns Person objects with detailed profile information
ActivtyService: returns Activities of people or group, allows activity creation
AppDataService: returns Gadget data, allows Gadgets to store data

NOTE: the SPI is where you hook in to Shindig if you want to expose your application's Social Graph data via the standard OpenSocial REST or RPC API. You implement these interfaces with code that calls your back-end to create, retrieve update and delete data. And you hook your implementation via Guice.

6... The handler returns a ResponseItem, which wraps one or a collection of POJOs. The Servlet may then write that response out or, in the batch case, continue to call handlers and collect more ResponseItems.

7...Servlet converts/serializes and returns ResponseItems. In the REST API case, once the handler, or handlers in the batch case, returns the response item(s), the DataServiceServlet calls the appropriate converter to serialize the item(s) to either JSON or XML format depending on what was specified in the 'format' request parameter.

And that's that...

re: How the Shindig REST API works

2008-08-11T17:02:15+00:00

Here's a diagram I worked up over the weekend to explain Shindig REST API internals to my team mates. See the Project SocialSite blog for the full story.

Lots of latest links: social networking APIs and more

2008-02-04T14:00:07+00:00

First, some links from open source projects I'm trying to follow. Check out the JMaki Webtop widget, it looks pretty useful. Now that I've got JMaki support in Roller, this could be the basis for some cool drag-and-drop blog layout. Wish I had time for that; I'm still trying to carve out some time to dig into the Abdera server framework.

jMaki Webtop
Cool iGoogle style portal interface via JMaki
JSPWiki: JSP Wiki 3 Design
JCR back-end, wiki spaces and more...
Abdera Server Implementation Guide
"The Abdera Server module provides a framework for constructing Atom Publishing Protocol server implementations."

I'm also following OpenSocial and Shindig (the reference implementation of OpenSocial) pretty closely, but thus far have not had time to dive into the code. There's lots of activity on the Shindig list, but thus far there's no server-side and security is still up in the air -- both are pending change to the spec itself. Marc Cantor has an interesting perspective on the OpenSocial.

ShindigStarted - hyves_api - Trac
"a small guide on how to get started on Shindig."
CNET Mark Cantor: Waiting for the OpenSocial hammer to drop
"We all hope that MySpace, Bebo, and others will open up and go beyond the original scope of OpenSocial to lay the groundwork for a truly open world of social networking."
<a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/17/kickapps-publishes-api-kit-adopts-facebook-and-opensocial-platform- standards/">KickApps Publishes API, Adopts Facebook and OpenSocial standards
"KickApps has adopted Googleâ€™s OpenSocial developer platform standards and is working with Facebook to adopt that companyâ€™s standards as well."

I'm also following Facebook. While Google and friends scramble to catch up, Facebook Apps are getting easier to write, thanks to a new JavaScript API, and easier to deploy thanks to Amazon Web Services.

Facebook Extends Platform to the Web - The Unofficial Facebook Blog
"This is a huge step in Facebook extending their platform beyond the Facebook.com domain and letting people leverage the power of the social graph"
JavaScript Client Library - Facebook Developers Wiki
"Applications that use this client library should be configured to load in an iframe, not be rendered with FBML"
Facebook JavaScript Client Library
"This JavaScript client library allows you to make Facebook API calls from any web site and makes it easy to create Ajax Facebook applications"
Amazon Web Services Blog: AWS For Facebook Applications
"we've teamed with Facebook to collect all of the resources that you need to be the next big success story in one convenient location."

Personally, I really like the idea of the web itself as the social network and your blog as the home for your personal profile. So, I think the new Social Graph API is a step in the right direction, as is the blog-based Distributed Social Networking (DiSo) project.

BuzzMachine:The internet is the social network
"The internet doesnâ€™t need more social networks. The internet is the social network."
Social Graph API - Google Code
Project homepage
Google Social Graph API Released on Dion Almaer's Blog
"Would you like to be able to make a quick call to get a JSON response that ties together a social graph made up of resources available on the Web?";
diso - Google Code
"DiSo (dee â€¢ zoh) is an umbrella project [for] as Chris puts it: 'to build a social network with its skin inside out'"
The Existential DiSo Interview on Vimeo
Factory Joe interviews himself re: Distributed Social Networking

And, I'm happy to see support for Twitter-like microblogging in Wordpress and Facebook like activity streams from Movable Type.

Introducing Prologue: WordPress.com
"Weâ€™re fans of Twitter around here, [but] while the format appealed to us it really just whetted our appetite for something more"
Building Action Streams - MovableType.org
"framework for collecting your actions from services around the web into one place for you to share back out as you see fit."
Action Streams | Plugin Directory | movabletype.org
"aggregate, control, and share your actions around the web "

And to wrap up: maybe I don't need to worry about the intersection of Blogging and Social Networking at all. Maybe there's no need to following all these APIs. Maybe the hype has peaked and Facebook and friends are about to go the way of the CB radio. Apparently, folks aren't spending quite as much time Facebooking as they used to:

ZDNet.com: Ohmigod! Social networkers just canâ€™t take it any more!
"it is entirely possible that people are beginning to question just how much time they spend socially networking, rather than socially living."