Hey Shinsou, Ugh where to start...
OpenSocial is a API for developing gadgets for social networking sites; Currently such a gadget is a couple of settings (title, height, user preferences, language bundles), and a bunch of HTML and JavaScript... and the container in which those things are brought together is the 'Gadget XML' file. Take a look at one of those files, and you'll see what I mean: http://www.labpixies.com/campaigns/todo/todo.xml So when a gadget / application is added to your social page it uses *that* XML file to know what to do. That's the XML part covered I hope.. Why you don't see 'XML' or 'OpenSocial' on any of the home pages of the social sites you mentioned is because it's a developer API, so it's not very interesting to the world en large. However if you searched for 'OpenSocial myspace' on your favorite search engine, you would quickly find: http://wiki.developer.myspace.com/index.php?title=OpenSocial_on_the_MySpace_Developer_Platform The same goes for other OpenSocial containers, they'll have their own developer center where you can learn about their OpenSocial support, and you can find a list of those containers + their developer pages at: http://wiki.opensocial.org/ (or simply click the 'docs' link on www.opensocial.org) So if you want to learn about OpenSocial in general and don't like reading documentation to much, it might be good to start with an introduction movie first: General info: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo-KEqLwV5A So on the question on how to use this from PHP. I'm not entirely sure about if you want to make an application (gadget), or become a OpenSocial container (allow OpenSocial apps to run on your website). The easiest way to host OpenSocial apps (so not make an app that can run on a container like orkut and myspace, but more 'run opensocial apps, like orkut and myspace do too'), the easiest way to do this is through Google Friend Connect (http://www.google.com/friendconnect), or if your willing to put in the time and have the technical expertise to do so to do this your self, you could check out shindig (http://incubator.apache.org/shindig). However if you would like to write an application (aka gadget) that can be used on those social platforms (from friendconnect to myspace, orkut, hi5, linkedin, etc etc), the unfortunately right now the best way to do that is to write a Gadget XML file, put in some javascript code that fetches the PHP generated content from your server (check out the the gadgets.io.makeRequest JavaScript call), and use the REST API for fetching social information from the social network on your server, and there's an OpenSocial PHP client library for that too: http://code.google.com/p/opensocial-php-client/ (with some examples included). Currently "0.8.1" is the version of OpenSocial that most containers support, but once 0.9 is live on most containers you can skip the JavaScript part for fetching content, and you can use "proxied content" and "data-pipelining" to let the social network site fetch the html document directly from your php server, without having to do that your self, if you want to know more about that, www.google.com is your friend ;) Hope that covers every question in your, well lets be honest, rant. I hope your actually planning to do something with it and I didn't type all this for nothing :) -- Chris On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 12:40 AM, Shinsou <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi, > First thing I want to say is that I don't know much about XML and > JavaScript, nor do I really see the use of XML files for languages > like PHP. > I have been looking around OpenSocial's website for a while now and > all I saw was just JavaScript and XML scripts. I have been told that > OpenSocial can help gather data from one site to my own, but I'm not > even sure how. Plus, when I went to websites which are said to use > OpenSocial (Twitter, Orkut, MySpace, FaceBook, etc.) I see little to > no signs of the key word "opensocial" and/or "xml" lest it is being > used as an RSS file. > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Implementing OpenSocial Containers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/opensocial-container?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
