Programming Social Applications

The Home View (Small View)

An application’s home view is generally a small view that provides personal aggregated content specific to a user. In other words, the home view cannot be accessed by any of the user’s friends or connections. For the most part, this type of view is the main interaction that the user has with the particular container, providing an aggregate feed of the activities of his connections, upcoming events, pictures, etc. Depending on the container that hosts this type of view, numerous applications may be displayed to the user in this view. Figure 1-5 shows its placement within the container.

Figure 1-5. The application home view

The home view also typically offers a small window view into the full application. Quite often, the container imposes restrictions on this view, such as limiting the markup that may be used to HTML, CSS, and some secure, container-defined tags that provide access to social information like invite drop-down lists, user data, etc. Many containers highly regulate the use of JavaScript and Flash due to performance and security concerns.

Since this view is often the user’s first interaction with your application in the container, it is vitally important that it provide as much functionality as possible to draw a user in to one of the more extensive application views. If a small view contains a number of the aforementioned restrictions, many developers ...