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The Challenges of Cross-Platform Development

Started by Nick O'Neill · 10 months ago

MySpace announced that their platform is now open for developers last night and by the end of the month, Google will be launching the Orkut platform. Suddenly within a couple months the social platform landscape has transformed from a single platform environment to multiple platforms all with dif ... Continue reading »

3 comments

  • I still think it's okay that people have to check out sites like www.allfacebook.com to find good apps ;)
  • Given the reality of proprietary OpenSocial extensions like the one offerred by MySpace, IMHO the ideal development path for OpenSocial is the following:

    1) Design your OpenSocial app to adhere strictly to the Google spec (currently at 0.7). This should suffice for most functions (profile/friend queries, rendering, sharing and activity stream pushing).

    2) Write alternative paths for code that uses Google's "widgets" Javascript namespace, since not all containers (e.g. MySpace) implement them.

    Ta da, you have an OpenSocial app that can run on any container, including Orkut and MySpace. Finally,

    3) If your apps want to take advantage of extra metadata available via platform-specific, then go for it, making sure to test for existence of those calls in your code.

    If you follow this path then you don't have to worry about "coding to the platform."
  • Edit: I meant the "gadgets" Javascript namespace in step 2 above....

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