Making Liferay Social - Opensocial

Social networks and portals are a natural fit. To that end we're currently doing work to integrate the brand new (still in incubation) Shindig project.

Shindig is the Gadget and Opensocial reference implementation currently in incubation under the Apache Software Foundation and being worked on by Google, MySpace, Orkut, Salesforce.com, and many other large social networking sites. Liferay is now joining the fray by integrating the project.

Currently, it takes the form of a Liferay Plugin, which means it's hot deployable. As the Shindig container evolves it may become more or less integrated into Liferay depending on the direction of it's internals.

Currently, it already passes Opensocial 0.7 Compliance Tests:

While, not officially a member of the spec team, Liferay will be following along closely and participating in ongoing development.

[Jorge Ferrer]

Wow Ray, that was fast!!

Congratulations!

[Alvaro Del Castillo]

Ray, anyplace where we can download the plugin to take a look and play a bit with it?

[Ray Augé]

It's in the plugins SVN module.

https://lportal.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/lportal/plugins/trunk/portlets/shindig-portlet

[John Ruffin]

Ray, I tried to toy around with shindig-portlet - to no avail. I entered a few gadget urls and couldn't get anything to render/display. Using lportal 5.0.* branch and the latest from plugins trunk.

http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/community/forums/-/message_boards/message/744781

[Ray Augé]

Yeah, sorry about that!

Three points here...

1) Currently one part of the portlet is broken because we remove the public interfaces for Expando, which is used for user preferences and opensocial data service. It was a little bit of a security risk... so while we're resolving that security issue, I have to provide a solution for the portlet (which means that until I fix that, the portlet is broken). Sorry!

2) You won't be able to render most things that are designed on/for gmodules/iGoogle because they use lots of iGoogle extensions which aren't part of the spec. Use the examples found in the /shindig-portlet/files/samplecontainer/examples/*, like SocialHelloWorld.xml. There might be a few existing gadgets out there that work... but they will be very simple... check the Shindig site for some that will work.

3) The Shindig used in this portlet is from SVN about three weeks back, and if you take a gander at the project lately, the code is almost completely different... there has been so much refactoring going on that it will be a few weeks before it stabilizes enough so that I can bring in a more updated/working version.

Shindig is very much a moving target right now. Once it's clearly stable and the specs are finalized, we may end up doing an integration directly in the portal.. as opposed to being a portlet (this is my personal goal and one I'll push for when the time comes ). But right now, it's just not feasible.

[Tiago Pinho Lopes]

Ray, how can I install the portlet: "Shindig portlet" ?
It´s not available in the Pluggin Admin inside to the liferay portal...

Please help me.

Is there any tutorial about how to install "Shindig portlet" ?

[Tiago Pinho Lopes]

Hello Ray,

I added the Shindig portlet (gadgets-svn-r648103.war) to liferay portal, inside the "Pluggin Admin" through this link: https://lportal.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/lportal/plugins/trunk/portlets/shindig-portlet

File: gadgets-svn-r648103.war

But I couldn't add a content in the porlet... Could you help me?
Do you have any example or tutorial on how to include content Shindig portlet?

Thanks!

[Parul Seth]

Hi Ray

Please tell me, is the current shindig-portlet in the trunk working with liferay 5.12 ???

I have installed the plugin, the portlet is added but displays nothing. No errors nothing.

Could you please tell me what am i doing wrong??
Kindly reply.

Thanks & Regards
Parul Seth

[Jamey Wood]

Hi Ray,

I'd like to update this to work current versions of Shindig and Liferay. And to that end, I'd like to understand the state of the Expando interfaces which you were previously using for user preferences, etc.

What was the security issue that you mention lead to the removal of the Expando JSON interface(s)? And is there any alternative you'd recommend I look into to get a user preferences mechanism working again?

I'm very familiar with Shindig and OpenSocial, but less so with Liferay. So I'm particularly interested in any guidance on how to do things in a way that will best align with Liferay's existing services, etc.

[Ray Augé]

Great Jamey! I seem to remember you from last year on the Shindig list.

There is definitely a way to get around not having direct ajax to the Expando API calls.

I was simply going to write an ajax action into the portlet plugin such that this action would then make calls to the underlying Expando services.

So,
- step 1) make a portlet which handles the opensocial calls via serverResource
- step 2) make serverResource call the underlying ExpandoLocalServices

BUT, we have some sponsored requests coming down the pipeline to re-implement shindig integration with the portal. It would be really fantastic to have someone experienced on the shindig side assist with that effort.. so you might not have to do it all yourself.

Send me an email [rauge AT liferay.com] and I'll hook you up with the team who are likely to be working on it.

[Raja Nagendra Kumar]

Hi Ray,

Any update on Opensocial 0.8 version integration with Liferay 5.2.x version. Also, is previous integration allows both external desktop and web applications to get/update to/from liferay.

Regards,
Nagendra

[Ray Augé]

I think there is a plan to re-implement Shindig in the 5.3 M2 development cycle, which ends ~ end of August time frame.

[John Russell]

Hey guys, I'm just getting started with Liferay and am interested in the opensocial liferay integration. Is the integration ongoing? Is there an SVN branch that I could pull that has anything workable in it right now? I know that its not done but I'd like to start to get a handle on what's going on and possibly get involved. Thanks.

[Megan Eskey]

What is the latest news on Shindig and opensocial? when is 5.3 due out? can we get early versions now?

[Ray Augé]

This is on the roadmap for post 5.3 GA (a.k.a. after 5.3 EE starts hitting the shelf).

[Sandy Pérez]

Hello Ray,

Will Apache Shindig be integrated in Liferay 5.3? Just now, I am working in a project where we need to integrate Liferay and Shindig. I have been studying both Apache Shindig and Liferay (even your Apache Shindig portlet ). However, in the Liferay’s repository, I cannot find any code related to the integration in the trunk folder. Is there new code about such integration in the Liferay’s repository?

Thank in advance.
Sandy

[Aarti Jain]

Hi Ray,

I found that the current shindig portlet available in the svn trunk was not rendering anything on deployment for Liferay 5.2.0
I have tried to fix the issues,enhanced the features and made it compatible with Liferay 5.2.0.
With respect to this I have also created the issue at Liferay JIRA and its corresponding patch: http://issues.liferay.com/browse/LPS-3097.
The details are also mentioned there. Please let me know your comments for the same.

Regards
Aarti Jain