Building OpenSocial Apps: A Field Guide to Working with the MySpace Platform(Developer's Library)

The Insider’s Guide to Writing OpenSocial Applications for MySpace–and Beyond!   When you write OpenSocial applications for MySpace, you can reach millions of users overnight. Building OpenSocial Apps shows you how, one step at a time. Whether you’re building casual widgets or feature-rich, professional applications, this book will teach you everything you need to know.   The authors are the leading experts on OpenSocial and MySpace and have personally helped construct the MySpace platform and OpenSocial standards. In this indispensable book, they walk you through the entire process of building apps, from signing up through building complex apps that can scale to thousands of users and interoperate on more than fifty social networks, such as Hi5, Orkut, and LinkedIn. They demonstrate today’s best practices for building OpenSocial applications and present dozens of tips for leveraging both MySpace and OpenSocial to their fullest. Coverage includes Installing and working with the MySpace Developer Platform Retrieving, parsing, and displaying user data, friend lists, and photos Sending App invitations and notifications Building mashups that communicate with third-party web services Marketing your App and building your user base Designing for performance, scalability, and fault tolerance Securing MySpace and OpenSocial apps, and protecting users’ privacy Building apps that display ads and accept micropayments A companion web site (opensocialtictactoe.googlecode.com) includes an extensive library of downloadable source code and other support materials.

Table of Contents:
Foreword xvi Acknowledgments xviii About the Authors xix Introduction xxi   Part I: Building Your First MySpace Application   Chapter 1: Your First MySpace App 3 Creating the App–“Hello World” 3 Installing and Running Your App 7 Summary 7   Chapter 2: Getting Basic MySpace Data 9 The Two Concepts That Every Developer Should Know 9 MySpace Data 10 Starting Our Tic-Tac-Toe App 10 Error Handling 24 Summary 27   Chapter 3: Getting Additional MySpace Data 29 How to Fetch a Friend List and Make Use of the Data 29 Fetching Media 39 Using opensocial.requestPermission and opensocial.hasPermission to Check a User’s Permission Settings 43 Summary 45   Chapter 4: Persisting Information 47 App Data Store 47 Cookies 56 Third-Party Database Storage 64 Summary 65   Chapter 5: Communication and Viral Features 67 Using opensocial.requestShareApp to Spread Your App to Other Users 67 Using opensocial.requestSendMessage to Send Messages and Communications 74 Getting Your App Listed on the Friend Updates with opensocial.requestCreateActivity Basics 79 Sending Notifications 88 Summary 90   Chapter 6: Mashups and External Server Communications 91 Communicating with External Servers 91 Mashups 92 Adding a Feed Reader to Our App 93 Adding an Image Search 112 Posting Data with a Form 114 Summary 114   Chapter 7: Flushing and Fleshing: Expanding Your App and Person-to-Person Game Play 117 Turn-Based Games 117 Supporting Person-to-Person Game Play 133 Finishing and Clearing a Game 144 “Real-Time” Play 146 Advantages and Disadvantages of App Data P2P Play 148 Summary 148   Part II: Other Ways to Build Apps   Chapter 8: OAuth and Phoning Home 153 What Is OAuth? 153 Secure Phone Home 157 Spicing Up the Home and Profile Surfaces Using makeRequest 173 Summary 174   Chapter 9: External Iframe Apps 177 REST APIs 178 Sending Messages Using IFPC 208 Summary 212   Chapter 10: OSML, Gadgets, and the Data Pipeline 213 The Big Picture 213 Writing a Gadget 214 OpenSocial Markup Language (OSML) 225 Putting It Together: OSML Tic-Tac-Toe 226 Summary 238   Chapter 11: Advanced OSML: Templates, Internationalization, and View Navigation 239 Inline Tag Templates 239 Working with Subviews 245 HTML Fragment Rendering 248 Data Listeners 250 Internationalization and Message Bundles 255 Future Directions 260 Summary 261   Part III: Growth and How to Deal with It   Chapter 12: App Life Cycle 265 Publishing Your App 265 Managing Your App 274 Managing Developers 279 Suspension and Deletion of Your App 280 Summary 281   Chapter 13: Performance, Scaling, and Security 283 Performance and Responsiveness 283 Design for Scale 292 Stability and Fault Tolerance 299 User and Application Security 300 Summary 303   Chapter 14: Marketing and Monetizing 305 Using MySpace to Promote Your App 306 User Base and Viral Spreading 309 Ads 311 Micropayments 316 Interviews with Successful App Developers 318 Summary 326   Chapter 15: Porting Your App to OpenSocial 0.9 329 Media Item Support 330 Simplification of App Data 341 REST APIs 343 Summary 348   References 351 Index 355

About the Author :
Chris Cole is a software architect at MySpace and is a major contributor to building the MySpace Open Platform and keeping it committed to OpenSocial. He’s been a core contributor to the OpenSocial 0.9 specification and is the primary architect and implementer of OSML (OpenSocial Markup Language) on the MySpace platform. Chris has been in software for fifteen years and has spent much of that time riding the various waves of the Internet and pushing the boundaries of the Web.   Chad Russell is the lead developer on the MySpace OpenSocial team. He knows the OpenSocial spec front to back, in addition to every tip, trick, and nuance of the MySpace platform itself. Chad holds an engineering degree from the University of Toronto and currently resides in Seattle, Washington.   Jessica Whyte has worked for several years as a journalist, most recently with Journalists for Human Rights, and is currently a graduate student at the University of Washington, studying Human-Centered Design and Engineering. She lives in Seattle with her husband and coauthor, Chad Russell.