The main interesting features included in 0.7 are,

• Support for viral growth. Two new methods allow your application to send messages on behalf of a user. You can invite a user’s friends to install your application with the requestShareApp method. You can also send an application-specific message with the requestSendMessage method. Both of these methods require the user sending the message to authorize the request first.
• Activity templates. You can now define activity messages with placeholders for pieces of applicaton or user data. This separation of data and presentation allows multiple activities to be combined into activity summaries—consolidated bundles of activities that let users know what their friends are up to without having to wade through a flood of messages.

(Also discussions are going on to give access to the “photo album” very soon)

Note: The existing opensocial application may need to have a couple of modifications to work with OS 0.7. Read the quote form the release note,

“The makeRequest method has been moved from the opensocial.* namespace to gadgets.io.makeRequest. Also, two new fields, HEADERS and POST_DATA, have been added to gadgets.io.RequestParameters so you can now send arbitrary HTTP headers or POST data in your request.”

The second one sounds great, but the first one means your existing call to opensocial.makeRequest() is gonna crash.

You can get a full release note for 0.7 here,

http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/docs/releasenotes.html#0.7

And take a look at the api reference for 0.7… which can surely give you more ideas ;)

http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/docs/0.7/reference/

The another important plus point of these components is that, the application’s pages will MATCH with the overall facebook theme. I really loved those and always tried to use the power of those components.

You can find a list of facebook components (they call it “facebook tags”) here,

http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/FBML

But, in the case of opensocial there are no pre-made components are available (I don’t know they are in consideration). But till now there are no discussions about such developer friendly items.

Even if google didn’t started thinking about it (may be because they are busy with making a stable OS), the concept has got huge value. In the present condition one opensocial developer should start his/her application from the very stone age and the resulting interface may not match with the proposed container. Even if he successfully managed to integrate it to one container (say orkut), he need to do much more work in the UI when he like to launch it in another container (like Hi5)

So get ready boyz… either u start building your own components or wait for google to get you some. Anyway I am gonna choose the first one and I believe that a cool choice for now.

Anyway, to get around this issue…. this was my trick
1) Load the resource using flash action script code…
2) Then assign the resource.

By this way, the resource file will be available on the cache and laszlo will quickly load this. We can show the progress bar by tracking the flash image loader.

Here is the example code…. may be somebody finds it useful.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<canvas height="100%" width="100%" >
<simplelayout></simplelayout>

<!-- CLASS TO HANDLE THE IMAGE DOWNLOAD AND TRACK THE PROGRESS -->
<!-- ~ JIM JOSE -->
<class name="iLoader"  extends="node" >
<attribute name="bytesLoaded" type="number" value="0"/>
<attribute name="bytesTotal" type="number" value="1"/>
<attribute name="finish" type="boolean" value="false" />
<attribute name="resourceURL" type="string" value="" />
<attribute name="_McLoader" />
<attribute name="_McContainer" />
<attribute name="_McListner" />

<handler name="oninit">

_McLoader = new MovieClipLoader();
_McListner = new Object();
_McContainer = _root.createEmptyMovieClip("_McContainer",0);
_McListner.parent = this;

this.setStatus = function(bytesLoaded, bytesTotal){
this.setAttribute('bytesTotal',bytesTotal);
this.setAttribute('bytesLoaded',bytesLoaded);
this.setAttribute('finish', (bytesLoaded==bytesTotal) );
}
_McListner.onLoadProgress = function(target, bytesLoaded, bytesTotal){
this.parent.setStatus(bytesLoaded,bytesTotal);
}
_McListner.onLoadInit = function(target){
_McContainer._visible = false;
}
_McLoader.addListener(_McListner);

if(this.resourceURL.length > 0){
this.onresourceURL.sendEvent();
}
</handler>

<method name="loadResource" args="url" >
this.setAttribute('resourceURL',url);
</method>

<handler name="onresourceURL">
this.setAttribute('bytesLoaded',0);
this.setAttribute('bytesTotal',1);
this.setAttribute('finished',false);
_McLoader.loadClip(this.resourceURL,_McContainer);
</handler>

</class>

<view width="100%" height="100%">

<iLoader id="loader" resourceURL="http://www.seriouswheels.com/pics-2006/2006-Aston-Martin-DBS-James-Bond-Casino-Royale-Daniel-Craig-1024x768.jpg" >
<handler name="onfinish" args="done">
if(done){
Debug.write('----------- Image loaded');
imgHolder.setAttribute('resource',this.resourceURL);
}
</handler>
<handler name="onbytesLoaded">
Debug.write('Downloaded ' + this.bytesLoaded + ' of ' + this.bytesTotal + ' bytes' );
</handler>
</iLoader>

<simplelayout axis="y" />
<view width="${loader.bytesLoaded/loader.bytesTotal*parent.width}" height="20" bgcolor="red" />
<view id="imgHolder" align="center" />

</view>

</canvas>

Other networking sites including myspace was also interested in developing such a platform to remain in the competition, but it was a difficult task since their existing structure is not so supportive.

On the other side, Google had their gadget technology which enables the developers to create applications for igoogle and google-desktop.

And there we go… google together with a whole bunch of service based sites announced their new concept of “OpenSocial” APIs, which not only enables the developers to create applications for a network, but also will be PORTABLE (theoretically) between the networks which supports opensocial. Actually opensocial is an extension of googles gadget technology which will give the base (common) platform for integrated applications developed in native HTML and JavaScript. The developer can also use flash widgets for application development.

So, whats the main difference between these two platform, opensocial and facebook ?? Well, the most important factor is that facebook apis can work only inside facebook but opensocial was work of different network platforms.

Opensocial sounds very exciting for all the developers on first sight. But it is still in beta version (latest, ver 0.7) and seems to have long way to go before actually getting stabilized. There are only limited documentation available and the security policies are still not clearly defined.

Opensocial has got server side handling with RESTful apis and the autentication is based on Oauth. Have a look at the developers documentation on code.google.com

http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/docs/dev_guide.html

Google groups are also a very usefull place for the people who like to take their first step with opensocial,

http://groups.google.com/group/opensocial