Despite the -12C  temperatures, piles of snow and traffic being ground to a complete halt in Kiev, we still had some 80 people making it to the meeting!

You can see the photos of the event in the kiev gtug picassa album and the presentation was recorded as well (skip ahead 30 seconds to get to the English part:):

While this is by and aimed at Spain, the threat to the legal system that they are responding to is also taking place in many European countries and there is even talk of a pan Europe-America proposal that unifies this across the different territories.

The declaration and thoughts in it are powerful and universal enough that I felt it was more then worth re-posting it here:

1 .- Copyright should not be placed above citizens’ fundamental rights to privacy, security, presumption of innocence, effective judicial protection and freedom of expression.

2 .- Suspension of fundamental rights is and must remain an exclusive competence of judges. This blueprint, contrary to the provisions of Article 20.5 of the Spanish Constitution, places in the hands of the executive the power to keep Spanish citizens from accessing certain websites.

3 .- The proposed laws would create legal uncertainty across Spanish IT companies, damaging one of the few areas of development and future of our economy, hindering the creation of startups, introducing barriers to competition and slowing down its international projection.

4 .- The proposed laws threaten creativity and hinder cultural development. The Internet and new technologies have democratized the creation and publication of all types of content, which no longer depends on an old small industry but on multiple and different sources.

5 .- Authors, like all workers, are entitled to live out of their creative ideas, business models and activities linked to their creations. Trying to hold an obsolete industry with legislative changes is neither fair nor realistic. If their business model was based on controlling copies of any creation and this is not possible any more on the Internet, they should look for a new business model.

6 .- We believe that cultural industries need modern, effective, credible and affordable alternatives to survive. They also need to adapt to new social practices.

7 .- The Internet should be free and not have any interference from groups that seek to perpetuate obsolete business models and stop the free flow of human knowledge.

8 .- We ask the Government to guarantee net neutrality in Spain, as it will act as a framework in which a sustainable economy may develop.

9 .- We propose a real reform of intellectual property rights in order to ensure a society of knowledge, promote the public domain and limit abuses from copyright organizations.

10 .- In a democracy, laws and their amendments should only be adopted after a timely public debate and consultation with all involved parties. Legislative changes affecting fundamental rights can only be made in a Constitutional law.

For this scenario we’ve created the meta-data interface, it allows you to post a gadget URL to it, and it will return a JSON structure with all the meta data of the gadget that you can use to build your app gallery, user preferences UI and create the iframe’s in your site that point to Apache Shindig (which will render the gadget for you). The quickest way to check out how the meta data interface works is by loading up the sample-metadata.html sample, and inspecting the requests using something like firebug, here’s a live example:
http://modules.partuza.nl/gadgets/files/container/sample-metadata.html

With that you have all the required info to build your site’s UI, however you also need to create the proper security tokens, and link shindig to your data source:

Security Tokens.

The gadget get’s it owner id / viewer id / app id / container string / module id from the security token, in a typical production setup this would be an encrypted blob generated by the container (ie ‘the social website’), and put on the gadget’s iframe with a &st=<encrypted blob>. Encryption ensures that that data can’t be tampered with so that people can’t spoof their user id’s etc.

Now both java and php shindig both use the same methodigy to generate their tokens (see shindig/php/src/common/{BasicBlobCrypter,BasicSecurityToken,BasicSecurityTokenDecoder}.php for example), so you really have two options, either implement the same crypto logic / format (it’s basically a text string, with entries seperated by :’s, and aes128 encryption with a shared secret) in your language of choice, or create your own crypto and implement a PHP class that can decrypt it (and tell shindig to use that new class using the ‘security_token_signer‘ and ‘security_token‘ configuration keys, similar configuration can be found in java shindig in one of it’s .xml config files), The first option is probably the simplest solution as long as aes128 is available in your language of choice.

There’s a bit more information about how security tokens work and how to implement them in this blog post:
http://www.chabotc.com/partuza/about-partuza-and-shindig-security-tokens/

Social Data.

Now java and php differ slightly here, with php you use the same configuration as I mentioned above to tell shindig which classes to use, and with java you’d use Guice to inject the right classes, but the basics are the same: You’ll need to somehow get the social data requests that happen in shindig to your data back-end.

Now when you are running php or java already this is pretty simple since you can use that code directly, however in this situation you really have two choices, either you implement the DB logic in PHP or Java (for PHP, you can use Partuza’s (an example opensocial implementation) service implementation as example: http://code.google.com/p/partuza/source/browse/trunk/Shindig/PartuzaService.php and http://code.google.com/p/partuza/source/browse/trunk/Shindig/PartuzaDbFetcher.php), or you can implement an RPC method (using something like json-rpc) where shindig relays all social data calls to your back-end.

OpenSocial and thus Shindig has 4 data call types, People, Activities, AppData and Messages; Now the spec states that the only must-have of those is the People interface, and you could return a NOT_IMPLEMENTED error code on every other call type.. However if you want to run the typical OpenSocial app, it’s advisable to also support the Activities and AppData interfaces.. Messages is a nice to have, but in practice most social sites don’t support this so it’s not a big issue at all if you don’t.

(click to view full size)

After a period filled with intense and insightful discussions by many, the votes have been tallied, and we now have a list of what will become the 0.9 revision of the OpenSocial specification.

You can see a list of what made it in at the OpenSocial wiki, and with additions like ‘Proxied Content‘ (being able to develop OpenSocial gadgets using server side html generation, aka clasic web development, something I’m sure a lot of people are incredibly excited about!), OSML (smart tags), OS Templating and a new light-weight and easy to use JavaScript API, this might well be one of the most exciting spec revisions we’ve seen in a while.

Make sure to check out the OpenSocial wiki for a full list of changes (30 in total); Oh and remember, non of these are ‘final’ until we have a prototype in place that proves that the proposals are implementable, so if your excited about any of these and want to help fleshing out the last details and implement them, get involved!