Programming Social Applications

Displaying the Gadget Using Shindig

Our gadget XML file is now ready to be displayed within an OpenSocial container. Our next task is to place it in a location where Shindig can access it. You can upload the XML file to a personal web server, use a social coding site like github (linking to the raw code URL, such as http://github.com/jcleblanc/programming-social-applications/raw/master/opensocial-gadgets/ch3_tabbed_preferences.xml), or put the XML file within your localhost web server to be served from there (e.g., http://localhost/ch3_tabbed_preferences.xml). In this example, we’ll place the XML file within our localhost directory and serve it from there.

Open a web browser. The URL syntax for our local Shindig container is http://shindig/gadgets/ifr?url=XML_URL. We can run that URL with our localhost file location to load the gadget, which gives us a URL like http://shindig/gadgets/ifr?url=http://localhost/ch3_tabbed_preferences.xml (assuming we named the file ch3_tabbed_preferences.xml). Navigate to that URL.

You should be presented with a gadget with two tabs, as displayed in Figure 4-1, with the “Setting Configuration” tab opening by default. Once that initial tab loads, the timed yellow message will be displayed. The second tab should display a series of links to more information.

Figure 4-1. Chapter 4 gadget rendered

This example sums up many of the core lessons we’ve learned in ...