14 April 2008
Google Gets the Discussion Going on “Templates” for OpenSocial
This morning an e-mail went out to the OpenSocial and Gadget Spec Mailing List for OpenSocial developers, mentioning proposed problems and a need for “Templates” in OpenSocial. For those Facebook developers out there, this could be one of the missing links in OpenSocial, replacing the benefits of FBML for Facebook.
The “template” idea it was mentioned won’t be available in the OpenSocial 0.8 spec, but they did introduce a timeline for the template concept. The timeline is as follows:
- April 14th. Kick off
- April 23rd. Draft proposal submitted to spec group for feedback
- May 7th. Deadline for issues to be raised
- May 28th. Resolution on all issues and spec version 1.0
- TBD. Reference implementation
It is estimated that developers should be able to start using a pre-release version of the javascript library enabling templates much earlier than May 28th.
As the author of O’Reilly’s “FBML Essentials“, I am very excited for this. Having such a library available will reduce the amount of code developers have to write for OpenSocial, as well as the number of requests back to our servers we have to make. It now makes you wonder if this is the final “template” spec, or will we see an XML-based spec like FBML come out when a RESTful API is released?
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