Building an OpenSocial Container

Your website can host third party OpenSocial apps integrated with your site's social network. A site that can host OpenSocial apps is called an OpenSocial container. The basic requirements for containers are detailed in the OpenSocial API Specification.

If you have questions about implementing your own OpenSocial container, visit the Implementing OpenSocial Containers discussion forum for input from other engineers building social networks.

Let's get this Shindig started
Apache Shindig is an open source project that helps you start hosting OpenSocial apps quickly by providing the code to render gadgets, proxy requests, and handle REST and RPC requests. On the Apache Shindig website you'll find information on how to checkout the source and build your own Shindig server as well as how to contribute to the Shindig project.

To integrate with Shindig you can connect your own social network's backend to the OpenSocial Service Provider Interface (SPI), which is part of Shindig, to allow an OpenSocial app to access your site's data. The SPI implements:

• Retrieving people information
• Storing and retrieving activities
• Storing and retrieving persistent data
• Sending messages (optional)

OpenSocial Container Compliance Testing
You can use the OpenSocial Compliance Tests to see if your site complies with the OpenSocial specification. The test gadget reports compliance at 3 levels: a required level and two optional levels.

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