Ryan J. Baxter

What is ActivityStreams?

This week I got back from a small conference in Boulder CO and while I was out there I thought to myself “Why do I always have to go out west to a conference, why not have one on the east coast?”.  So I thought about taking the initiative and seeing if I can gather enough interest from people to make it worth my time.  I am willing to do all the leg work I just want to make sure I can get enough quality speakers and attendees.  I have already put some “feelers” out on some of the mailing lists I belong to and have gotten a number of responses already, which is very encouraging.  I am not thinking of making this anything huge, probably a 1 day conference with a few sessions, and possibly some kind of activity later in the evening, but if there is enough demand than I can certainly expand it.  I am looking for sessions on open standards like, OAuth, OpenSocial, OpenID, ActivityStreams, CMIS, etc but I am also open to other ideas.  I think the fall will be a good time to have a conference because it SHOULDN’T be to cold yet, I am targeting September 2012.  So if you are interested feel free to leave a comment or find me on Twitter, @ryanjbaxter and let me know!

I am heading out to Boulder Colorado to a small conference called BoulderUX. I am going to be speaking about OpenSocial and embedded experiences. I am trying to get more and more companies not only interested in OpenSocial but start thinking about how they can use gadgets such as embedded experiences to enrich their end user’s experience.  We will be covering the anatomy of the gadget XML, what an embedded experience is, how to use the OpenSocial 2.0 Sandbox, and finally my college Stanton will be doing a live coding session.  The sides we will be using at the conference are posted up on slideshare.  Also if you are interested in the code we will be referencing it can be found here.

Up until last week my blog was hosted on wordpress.com.  When I started blogging, I wasn’t sure how much I was going to actually like it so I didn’t want to put to much time and money into creating one.  Wordpress.com seemed like the simplest place to set one up.  However I ended up really like blogging and I wanted to do different things with my blog which I couldn’t do on WordPress.com.  I decided to look into how I could host my own WordPress blog.  I eventually found that there were EC2 images on Amazon’s cloud that were already setup with WordPress.  Plus if you use a basic EC2 instance it’s free for a year, you can’t beat that.

If you have ever tried to work with JSON in an Eclipse plugin you know it is not strait forward.  One of the easiest ways to work with JSON is to use the libraries from json.org.  However if your working with JSON inside of Notes 8.5.2 or later, there is actually a library built into Notes you can use.  Your plugin will need to have a dependency on com.ibm.commons.  In this plugin there are several classes you can use to work with JSON.  The Javadoc for the APIs can be found here.  Here is a sample class which will parse a string of JSON into a Java object which you can in turn use to get values from.  As JSON becomes more and more popular with web services, having libraries to deal with JSON objects when your not using Javascript is critical.

While  I was on vacation, Enterprise 2.0 took place in Boston Ma.  Since I was out of town one of my colleages, Andrew Davis (IBM), went to represent OpenSocial at the conference.  He was demoing the OpenSocial 2.0 Sandbox which we have been working on for the OpenSocial Foundation.  David Berlind from InformationWeek did a short interview with Andrew at Enterprise 2.0 where he demoed Embedded Experiences in the OpenSocial 2.0 Sandbox.  Remember embedded experiences is one of the new features being released in OpenSocial 2.0 and IBM has been driving this feature in the specification.  The interview went really well, except for the mention of Outlook and Exchange.  Check out the video, and don’t forget you can play in the sandbox as well.

I was having a conversation with Mikkel today, and he told me he was taking a trip to AusLug this year to do a few sessions on plugin development/OSGi and possibly an all day type of session.  A light bulb went off in my head and I thought it would be a great idea to do a “hack day” or hackathon type of thing at Lotusphere this year, even if it’s something unofficial, where we just get a decent size room where people can come and hack.  Besides, developers love nothing better than a good hacking session  It could be really specific, or we could make it really broad and have a more general IBM Collaboration Solutions Hackathon where we have experts inside and outside IBM to help you get started, tackle a difficult problem you have been having, or just collaborate on an interesting idea you have.  We can tackle topics with plugin development, XPages, Domino apps, web development, etc.  What do people think?  I would be happy to help organize something if we can get enough interest.  Please leave a comment if your interested and retweet/repost to spread the word.

I have been MIA lately, for a number of reasons.  The biggest reason is because I recently got married on June 11th.  Preparing for that took up a lot of my spare time, although I must admit, my now wife did a majority of the hard work.  Then I took a 2 week vacation to Tahiti for our honeymoon.  (Tahiti is amazing by the way, if you ever get a chance to go I suggest you take it.)  At the same time leading up to the wedding work was getting really busy.  We are working very hard to build some very cool things for all our products.  Unfortunately our deadlines happened to coincide with my wedding and since I was driving some of these features I played a critical role in completing them.  Any spare time I had left over from planning our wedding, I spent working.  Now that the wedding and honeymoon is over I’m hoping I can get back to blogging and writing some more useful posts.  I already have some topics in mind that I would like to write about, and I think I might make another set of tutorials as well.  Looking forward to getting back into the swing of things!

Not much else to say except this is an excellent video on the new stuff in HTML5.  I highly recommend you check it out if you are a web developer or are interested in web development.

Yesterday a patch I wrote for embedded experiences was applied to the draft version of the OpenSocial 2.0 spec.  If you recall from my previous posts, here and here, embedded experiences is going to be a huge part of future products at IBM.  However by making it part of the OpenSocial spec we are trying to spread adoption of this technology outside IBM as well.  Any software that has email or an activity stream could take avantage of embedded experiences if they wanted.  You could imagine for example embedded experiences in GMail or Twitter.  Anyways if your interested you can check out the draft here.  Next step is to add a reference implementation to Shindig, so everyone can start playing with some real code, look for that soon.