OpenSocial Tutorial - Part 1: Gadget Basics

Hi I'm Dan and I work on Open Social
and today I'm going to take you through the basic steps
in running your own open social applications.
So the first thing we are going to do
is a little primer on gadgets.
And Gadgets at their basic level are just XML files.
and so we are going to take
a quick look at what a gadget xml file looks like
as you can see a gadget is just xml
at the top of the file you can see the file
you can see the xml version type and encoding
and below that you can see the tags that specify this
as a gadget file
we open everything up with a module tag
and inside of that we have module preferences.
that specify things like the applications title
and requires features necessary for the application
here requiring the open social feature
and below that we actually define the content of the gadget
here the content type is html
inside of that we have a "cdata" section
which is where all of our code, our html, and java script go
and the string "hello world".
so now that that little intro's out of the way we can
go down and run our first social application.
so there's a couple of things that you will need for this
First a text editor and a web hosting account.
and in addition to that an orkut account
and access to the orkut sandbox
which is where we allow you to test your social applications.
i will assume that most of you have a text editor
and a lot of you probably already have web hosting
but if you don't there are two things you can try.
First is google code project hosting which is
a place to host open source applications
so if you'd like to make your gadget open source
you can host it there
and if you don't want to do that you can use google page creator
which allows you to upload html files and edit html files
and upload other non html files like gadget specifications
like what we're writing here.
so once you have that out of the way
your going to need to to create an orkut account
which is pretty straight forward.
just goto orkut.com and it will walk you through the steps.
once you've done that,
you're going to need to sign up for access to the orkut sandbox.
which is pretty straight forward as well.
we have a link that you can use to do that.
and once you have access
you can log into "sandbox.orkut.com"
and add your gadget
and I'll show you how to do that right now
so what you should do is take the text of the sample gadget
copy that into a text file
and save it on your web hosting account as "helloworld.xml"
log in to your orkut account
click on the edit button,
next to apps on the left hand side of the page
type in the url of your newly created xml file
click on the add application button
grant the application permission to access your account
and then click on the link that it adds to the applications on your page.
so now you have installed your first social application into orkut.
for more information on what i just did
as well as more information on the rest of the social API
check out the tutorial on "code.google.com"
under the open social section.