Articles

• OpenSocial Tutorial (v0.8) - August 2008
  Crawl, walk, run. In this tutorial you'll learn to write an OpenSocial application from scratch and add features until you have an app that lets users exchange gifts with their friends. Who wants a red pistachio?
• Social Design Best Practices - November 2007
  Engage the user, foster communication, and build communities. Once you have some familiarity with the OpenSocial API, this article will help you design an application that will thrive.
• Requesting Data in OpenSocial (v0.8) - August 2008
  Every great socially-aware application needs to be able to request and manipulate social data. This article explains and uses code samples to explore the different requests your application may make via the OpenSocial DataRequest object.
• The Persistence API (v0.8) - August 2008
  Confused about storing and retrieving VIEWER, OWNER, VIEWER_FRIENDS and OWNER_FRIENDS data? Read this article to learn everything that you ever needed to know about using OpenSocial's Persistence API.
• Introduction to makeRequest (v0.8) - August 2008
  Need to work with content outside the OpenSocial container? This article explains the gadgets.io.makeRequest function, which allows you to send data to and retrieve data from remote servers.
• Latency Combat Field Manual (v0.8) - September 2008
  Get your app up to speed with these techniques for reducing load times. From general web development best practices to OpenSocial tips and tricks, make your app more responsive and reduce the load on your server at the same time.
• Building an OpenSocial app with Google App Engine (v0.8) - September 2008
  Need to add some server side logic or data storage to your OpenSocial app? Google App Engine provides a scalable solution for your back end—and you still don't need to set up and maintain your own servers.
• OpenSocial in the Cloud (v0.8) - September 2008
  Now that your application has a server-side back-end, you need to think about scale—can your hosting platform accomodate thousands of users and millions of queries per day? This article demonstrates how to use cloud services such as Google App Engine and Amazon S3 to handle the storage needs for a photo sharing application. It also covers client-side best practices for reducing the load on your back-end.
• Leveraging Google Data APIs in OpenSocial Apps - August 2008
  Learn how to access the Google Data APIs from the JavaScript in your OpenSocial app, including how to interact with the Google Accounts APIs for authentication.

More articles

Find more articles in the OpenSocial Community Wiki.