A Bit of a Shindig
One of the great things about open standards is that anyone can implement them - including those in the free software world. An obvious candidate for this treatment is the new OpenSocial set of APIs from Google, and here's an Apache project doing just that:Shindig will provide implementations of an emerging set of APIs for client-side composited web applications. The Apache Software Foundation has proven to have developed a strong system and set of mores for building community-centric, open standards based systems with a wide variety of participants.
A robust, community-developed implementation of these APIs will encourage compatibility between service providers, ensure an excellent implementation is available to everyone, and enable faster and easier application development for users.
The Apache Software Foundation has proven it is the best place for this type of open development.
The Shindig OpenSocial implementation will be able to serve as a reference implementation of the standard.
Posts
2 comments:
What is particularly important about the Shindig project is that it is seeded by code from a number of the Open Social partners.
The Shindig proposal was originally made by people at Ning with support from other partners. The orgiinal code drop was to be Nings client side implementation of Open Social.
However, before the proposal even reached the vote stage Google had offered to provide their client side code as an alternative, along with their server side code too. At the same time many other Open Social partners stepped forwards with their support for the proposal.
Having a truly independant open source implementation of the Open Social standard will go a very long way to ensuring that that the standard is indeed open. Having the support of Google, MySpace, Ning and many other highly significant Open Social partners is, I hope, an indication that these partners realy do want Open Social to be an open standard.
Brilliant - thanks for that extra information.
Post a Comment