Experience with Orkut as OpenSocial container
On Saturday, Vishal asked me about my experience while I developed “Cities My Visited” Application. He wants to mention this at his blog. He is interviewing application developers to know their experience. I thought to share my development experience with all through this blog.
When I started developing this application I had very small scope in mind. I wanted to give chance to Orkut users to put the cities that they love at their profile. This is just a normal google map with all their favorite cities marked with red bubbles. I took this as a simple concept and started developing my application. It became my routine to spend daily 2 hours at night for this application development. It took much time that what I thought initially as many features came in mind and implemented all. Another benefit of developing this application was to learn Google map.
At start I was not sure how to show cities list to user for the map area he selected. After searching on net I got world cities database. It was very huge so I only kept selected country cities at my database. Initially application was showing cities list at right side for the selected map. If map zoom level is less it was showing many cities with paging. Generally cities starting name with “a” were shown on first page. It was very annoying to find cities from this list and add it to map. Searching cities was also taking a lot of time was it has to search cities in database and then show that info on this Orkut server.<!–more–>
One of my friend, Shardul who was using this application infront of me, said why don’t you let user add city through just double click. They should only double click city name on map and it should add city to map. I took this as a challenge and found a third party API services which gives cities list in particular radius area if we provide them co-ordinates. This was a nice feature for my site. Now if user double clicks on map, it shows list of cities in that clicked area. User can then click name of city and add to their map. Obviously there were few technical challenges right form showing floating window to matching this service with Google map cities. It wasted my few weekends but finally Voila!!! It worked. I removed right side cities list and shown bigger map. Now application looks nice with this map, favorite cities and top cities at bottom.
I came across many limitations of Orkut OpenSocial implementation during this. You can’t find from Orkut who all of your friends installed Application. You can’t let users send share application message. Though since version 0.7 now they are allowing sending message to users if end user submits a form which applications can show. Still there is no way that you can let users send scraps. You can play only with Friend Updates or activities. Sometimes container through JS errors at Firbug which you can’t identify. But overall I found creating application for Orkut much easier than for MySpace. Myspace confuses a lot with different views and their access at sandbox. Anyways, lets talk about it some time later.
Overall my experience of building this application was very nice and it evolved slowly since its launch at directory. I call current version of my application as 2.0. Any features you want to suggest for version 3.0?
Watch the latest videos on YouTube.com
