June 2009 Archives

For those of you developing on a Google-run OpenSocial container (orkut, iGoogle, Google Friend Connect, or Gmail), please be aware that Google will be changing their User-Agent string for outgoing OpenSocial requests soon.

Previously, this string was:
Google OpenSocial agent (http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html)

When the change goes live, the string will be:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible) Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html)

This will be the agent used for all outgoing requests, including fetching gadget specs, osapi.http or gadgets.io.makeRequest calls, and proxied content fetches.

We're expecting few developers to be affected by this change, so if you're not checking the User-Agent for requests to your server, you shouldn't have to make any changes.

I'm happy to announce that we've just finished work on a preliminary "Getting Started" guide for the OpenSocial PHP client library.

This guide should help answer a lot of the questions people first have when starting to develop OpenSocial applications with PHP. We've covered such topics as getting and installing the library, how to batch requests and deal with errors, and how to make simple OpenSocial requests for People, Activities, and App Data. Also included is our current roadmap so you can see what we're working on.

While every effort has been made to create a comprehensive developer's guide, we certainly understand that there still may be areas of the client library which are not fully documented or where the examples are unclear. If you see any place where the documentation can be improved, please take a minute to file a feature request in our issue tracker, and we'll be able to make the documentation better for everyone.

Happy Coding!
~Arne (on behalf of the PHP client library team)