Programming Social Applications

Partuza

Now that we are able to load OpenSocial gadgets, what’s next? At this point, we are still a long way from developing a fully featured social networking website; to do that, we would need a user management system, registration, login, and a proper method to load and display our new gadgets. Instead of going through the intricacies of social networking application container development, let’s take a giant leap forward and build out an example container with Partuza.

Partuza, shown in Figure 3-3, is an example OpenSocial social networking container that works with Shindig. This example container has an abstraction layer for Shindig built in, which allows users to seamlessly interact with OpenSocial gadgets by entering in a URL to the gadget. The word “partuza” is Spanish slang for “party,” just as “shindig” is American slang for the same.

Figure 3-3. Partuza

Installing Partuza will give you an immediate jumping-off point for working with OpenSocial gadgets and creating a social networking container with minimal configuration and engineering effort.