Voila!!! Today I got my application listed at Orkut directory. This is really a happy moment and very thanks to Orkut as well as Jason. Jason checks these applications and approves for listing at directory. He is really a nice guy ( I can say this from my email communication with him). Name of my application is “Cities I visited“. http://www.orkut.com/AppInfo.aspx?appId=223146457259. Just after few hours of application listing at directory, my server went down with tremandous response from users. Looks that I need to optimize the application by reducing request to Orkut database and my own server. At night I quickly did some updates which worked well and now my server is stable again. Thanks Google once again by giving such a good chance to developers through OpenSocial.
Google first announced its OpenSocial platform at November 2007 and I was crazy about it since that time. At start it was very unstable which became more robust since its version 0.7 launched at Feb 2008. Just to learn this platform I started developing a sample application and it was a nice experience.
I started developing application for Orkut using OpenSocial API and it was really fast. I only had weekends to develop my application still it was completed in just 3-4 weekends. It provides you so many API functionalities just like Google Gadgets. You don’t have to worry about AJAX calls and even integrating Google Map.
But still because of some limitations that platform is having and the documentation provided by Google ( its now revamped and made up to date) it was quite challenging and interesting 
. While development I came across few points which takes much time for any OpenSocial newbie to understand. I thought to share those with all.
Challenges that one may face while developing OpenSocial Orkut Application -
i. Using “makeRequest” you can all from your server. You can even post values to this file. It returns your either text, XML or JSON data based on the “ContentType” you specified. This page is a good reference if you want to use “makeRequest” function.
ii. Getting friend’s email address - You can fetch profile details of application owner’s friends like his name, gender, profile url etc. But it doesn’t allow fetching email address for security reason. If you are getting error when you try to access any user’s email address, you know now why is it so.
iii. Hey, you can’t yet add scrap to other’s scrapbook through your application. But still you wan’t to notify others about any activity that user performed through your application? There is a good news that you can do that through “Updates” at profile by creating new Activity.
iv. You can fetch information of Application owner’s friends but not his friends. You can’t even fetch information of any visitor’s friends even if he is at your application. So don’t waste your time in researching why its not working.
And PHP Rocks again….
I developed my application using PHP at server-side. PHP Rocks and works really well with all functionality that you expect. On Orkut Developer Forum you find many other peers who are using PHP. It helps to get your query solved faster. Thanks to Orkut Developer Forum “Gurus” for that.
Useful URLs
Official Orkut Developer Forum
Orkut Documentation
Orkut Developer Blog
— Pravin Nirmal
