Programming Social Applications

The Embedded Application: Building in a Black Box

One of the most important things to remember when you’re developing applications on top of a social container is that you are not building within a traditional application environment, where you just have to ensure that your application is loading and your server uptime is high. Those are all variables that we as developers can account for and adjust if necessary.

Figure 1-4 displays the difference between a traditional application development environment (right) and the black box environment of a social application container (left). This is a very base-level comparison, as each layer may also contain a number of processing, filtering, and serving mechanisms.

Figure 1-4. Loading an application in a container (left) versus a traditional server environment (right)

The difference is the middle tier of the social container environment. When building social applications within a container, you are building on top of the infrastructure that the container defines. Instead of the application servers providing the code and functionality for the application directly, they provide content to the container for processing. The container may then filter the content for malicious code, unsupported features, or any number of other elements before returning the sanitized content back to the application.

What this means is that you are now relying on a ...