Meeting with the project development team

I looked into more than 130 discussion forums on Ning developer site to identify similar cases to our project. I found the contents of discussions very useful. The community members raised a lot of queries and solutions which answered a lot of my questions. By looking at the size of the Ning developers community and the high volume and diversity of discussion forums, it made me realise how enthusiastic Ning is in promoting and encouraging the development work on its infrastructure especialy its dedication to online support.

I arranged a meeting with Sam Rowley on 26th January to show him my findings towards Widgets, Gadgets and OpenSocial applications, he was satisfied with the outcome of the research. We then together narrowed down the research into smaller sections and came to conclusion that we need to implement OpenSocial application version 0.8 (the latest) for the project.

Communicating with Ning developers members

I signed up to get access to the application developer sandbox with OpenSocial v0.7 The purpose of this social network is to enable developers to implement and test the OpenSocial Application with Ning. However Ning points out those editorially-selected applications will be featured as part of their new directory. This made me feel concerned about the privacy of our application as we do not want it to be viewed by the public.

I sent a query to Ning to enquire what is the appropriate type of OpenSocial Application to be developed: (e.g. Profile based OpenSocial Applications or Network Wide OpenSocial Applications) taking into account the privacy and security demands.

Research into third-party applications - 2

I have been researching the OpenSocial applications the last couple of weeks. I went through Ning developer online discussions to find out what other programmers are developing on Ning .Ning provides advanced guidelines on how to develop an OpenSocial application. The developer needs to be familiar with XML, HTML and JavaScript languages. I am experimenting with some of them at present.


OpenSocial application

OpenSocial is a set of common APIs standards - mostly based on XML and JavaScript - for social networks. It was initially developed by Google but has been embraced by the wider social networking and application developer community.

Ning will give the developer the ability to create powerful applications without the need to dive into Ning's source code and OpenSocial has been widely adopted by other social networks such as Orkut, Hi5 and MySpace. Eventually the OpenSocial Applications that are written by Sam’s team for Ning should be easily portable to other social networks.

Ning are fully committed to helping application developers use the OpenSocial platform to its fullest potential, they offer a selected number of developers sandbox environments to make sure that Features on Ning work correctly. http://developer.ning.com/beta. Ning Developer Network community can be targeted for a support with the PHP, APIs and CSS/JavaScript.

The differences between Gadgets and Features? It is worth to know that Ning Gadgets previously supported v0.5 of the OpenSocial. Ning Features will support OpenSocial v0.7 and offer access to additional social network information and more detailed documentation. Ning Features will also more closely follow the OpenSocial technical specifications.

Research into third-party applications - 1

It was agreed, as part of the last meeting action points, to investigate into widgets and gadgets which can be integrated into our validation support network. The purpose is to create a similar application to act as a platform link from Ning to HIVE documents. The first thing that comes to mind is, What is the difference between them?

Widget:

Widgets are interactive virtual tools that provide single-purpose services such as showing the user the latest news, the current weather… or even a language translator, among other things. Examples of widget engines include: … Microsoft gadgets in Windows Vista…

Gadgets:

Gadgets are computer programs that provide services without needing an independent application to be launched for each one, but instead run in an environment that manages multiple gadgets and then adds “See: Google Gadgets, Microsoft Gadgets, Apple Widgets.

Difference:

The easiest way to explain it is that gadgets are widgets, but not all widgets are gadgets. Gadgets are a subset of widgets, with the distinctive property of being proprietary. For example, Microsoft Vista has gadgets, which are widgets that work only on Microsoft Vista. Further, Google has their own set of gadgets that users can add to their websites and/or Google desktop. Although Google’s gadgets are technically widgets and they can be used on any website, Google decided to use the term ‘gadget’ to make all of our lives harder :-(