Ryan J. Baxter

Cross posted from the IBM SBT Blog.

If you are a developer building on IBM’s Social Business platform and are interested in OpenSocial and/or embedded experiences there are going to be 3 webinars on those topics this week.  Details are below.

Today one of my colleagues and lead for Widgets and LiveText in Notes and iNotes, Doug MacDonald, posted a set of  videos on how to use and create all different kinds of Widgets and LiveText recognizers.  It is the most comprehensive overview of Widgets and LiveText I have ever seen and the videos provide great demonstrations on anything you have ever wanted to to with these features.  The wiki article speaks for itself so there is not much more to say here.  Also be sure to check out this video of the new Widgets and LiveText features in IBM Notes and iNotes 9.0.

In a few weeks, on May 19th, the Apache Foundation will be hosting a BarCamp in Boston.  The even will take place at Microsoft’s NERD Center in Cambridge.  Ultimately, as with all BarCamps the topics covered will be left up to the attendees, but we have some suggestions as well.

Today the OpenSocial Foundation released the OpenSocial Explorer, a new open source project meant to help developers learn how to build OpenSocial gadgets.  One of the biggest challenges any developer faces when trying to learn how to build an OpenSocial gadget is how to get started and use all the features provided by the specification.  In theory it seems very easy to get started building an OpenSocial gadget, but as any developer knows, it doesn’t matter how easy a platform is to understand if you don’t have something to help you get started you can, and will strugle.  The OpenSocial Explorer is meant to address this exact issue.  Instead of spending hours getting started building your first gadget it will only take you a few minutes!  The OpenSocial Explorer provides developers with sample gadgets demonstrating how to use various features of the OpenSocial specification and in addition allows developers to modify those samples and re-render the gadget to explore how those changes effect the gadget.  This not only allows you an easy way to understand all the features of OpenSocial but provides a great jumping off point for getting started with your own gadget.

One of the new features announced in the release of Notes and Domino 9.0 Social Edition last week was support for OpenSocial in Notes and iNotes.  This should not come to as a surprise to most of you as we (IBM) have been touting this feature for a while now.  None the less, if you have been living under a rock for the past year or so here is some background on OpenSocial.

Lately I have been writing quite a few Dojo AMD modules for a project I am working on.  These modules include Dojo widgets and API level code.  Being a good developer I wanted to make sure I could test the code I was writing.  I had worked with other JavaScrupt unit testing frameworks in the past and had been frustrated by them because there was no real good “framework” built around them.  You could do the basics that you would expect, like running some setup and cleanup code but there was no framework for mocking up objects or inspecting other aspects of the code you were testing.  I had heard good things about a framework called Jasmine recently and decided I would check it out.

IBM will be hosting another Social Business Toolkit community call on December 17th 2012 at 11:00 AM EST. This is a great opportunity to learn more about the IBM Social Business Toolkit and how you can leverage it in your applications. Experts from the development team will be on the call to answer all your questions. You can download an ICS file to add a reminder about the call to your calendar.

Today was the first release of the IBM Social Business Toolkit SDK.  The SDK is meant to help developers build apps using IBMs Social Business Platform, including products like IBM Connections, IBM (Lotus) Domino, IBM Sametime, IBM SmartCloud For Social Business, and many more.  The initial release of the SDK has APIs which focus on IBM Connections and IBM SmartCloud.  Not all APIs in Connections and SmartCloud have support within the SDK yet but that will come in the future.  The good news is that once you understand how to use the SDK to call an endpoint (ie a REST API) it is VERY simple to call any API, whether it is an API for an IBM product or not.  This initial release has Javascript and Java APIs.  We made this choice because Java and Javascript are the most common languages used by not only developers integrating into IBMs portfolio but in general as well.  Javascript is also used in almost every web app.  It doesn’t matter if you are a Java, PHP, Ruby, Node.js, or XPages developer all of these languages can use Javacript on the front end.  The plan is that in future releases we will have support for other languages beyond just Java and Javascript.  Also since the project is open source, feel free to contribute API libraries for your favorite language  The Javascript portion of the SDK is also meant to be used along side a higher level Javascript library.  Initially the SDK has support for various versions of Dojo , but support for JQuery is planned for in the future.  If you are a developer I encourage you to start taking a look at the SDK by downloading the source and getting it up and running on your favorite app server.  Also if you want to get started setting up a J2EE development environment for the SDK you can follow along with this video (written instructions will be available soon).

Today ended our (IBMs) very first Social Business App Dev Workshop.  Overall the workshop was a huge success for both IBM and the attendees.  Over the first 2 days of the workshop we covered various topics including IBM’s new Social Business Toolkit and SDK,  Domino and XPages, OpenSocial, and even mobile app development.  Best of all attendees got to work through numerous “labs” which demonstrated all the capabilities of IBM’s Social Business Platform.  It was quite the site to see 40 developers heads down hacking away and learning all kinds of new technologies in the process.  The last day of the workshop was dedicated to the attendees where everyone got one on one time with IBM developers to work through the use cases they have for their apps.  This is invaluable since one on one time with the developers who are experts on IBM’s Social Business Platform is very rare.  When we asked if attendees found the workshop useful the answer was a resounding YES!  This was validation that we are heading in the right direction and that there is a demand for these types of events.  Of course, this being the first workshop, we had some hickups but we will be reviewing all the problems we had and all the feedback we got and making improvements to the labs and all the content presented making each subsiquent workshop better than the last.  The next workshop will be held in Dublin on December 3rd.