Empowering the Exceptional Web Experience with the IBM Social Business Toolkit
Lotusphere was last week and I had an opportunity to attend one of the jumpstart sessions on 1/15/2012 titled “Empowering the Exceptional Web Experience with the IBM Social Business Toolkit” with Mike Taylor and Paul Bastide, software engineers from IBM.Social Business Toolkit is available on Lotus Greenhouse. Here are some of the highlights.
What is the Social Business Toolkit?
- Set of tools and techniques to make applications social
- A set of APIs and services used to:
- Add social capabilities to applications
- Integrate non-social applications and services to social applications
- Integrates online with LotusLive
- Makes custom integrations with IBM Connections much easier
- Enables integratoin of aplications within containers
- Social Business APIs are based on open standards
The Toolkit
- Data Formats – Data is the foundation and understanding how data is formated and structured is critical. Data is represented in two main ways.
- Javascript Object Notation (JSON)
- JSON is raw text
- Represents objects with the descriptive text
- More efficient than XML since data is represented in name/value pairs instead of repeating nodes and attributes
- XML
- Hierarchical datamodel with nodes and attributes
- Accessing toolkit services
- HTTP is the most common way to access data. The 4 HTTP methods manipulate data as follows:
- Get – List collection of resources
- Put – Replace
- Post – Create
- Delete – Remove
Social Business Toolkit API Explorer
View the Social Business Toolkit API Explorer here.
- Test environment for developing social applications
- Can make API calls, see the response, and access documentation for APIs in a single interface
- Goal is to help developers quickly understand and try APIs for building social applications
Highlights
- Uses OAuth to authorize
- Samples for the following
- Activities
- Profiles
- Files
- Wikis
- Domino data services
- Documentation is available right online
- Much easier to consume than traditional javadoc for J2EE development
- Makes developing and testing integration with Connections much easier
Open Authorization (OAuth)
- Open standard for authorization. It is:
- Token-based
- Given to 3rd parties
- Common in virtually every social site, e.g. log in using Facebook
- Used for authorization, not authentication
- OAUTH.net contains tools to help withOAuth development
Open Social
- Web standard which defines how to build socially enabled applications
- Current specification is 2.0.1 and aligns close with OAuth
- Gadges are built using XML, JavaScript, CSS and XML
- Google Gadgets are an example
- Visit http://opensocial.org for more informaiton
- Java and PHP containers have been developed by Apache Shindig
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