Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Google Announces OAuth access to IMAP/SMTP in Gmail

Google Code Blog: OAuth access to IMAP/SMTP in Gmail
Google has long believed that users should be able to export their data and use it with whichever service they choose. For years, the Gmail service has supported standard API protocols like POP and IMAP at no extra cost to our users. These efforts are consistent with our broader data liberation efforts.

In addition to making it easier for users to export their data, we also enable them to authorize third party (non-Google developed) applications and websites to access their data at Google. One of the more common examples is allowing a social network to access your address book in order to send invitations to your friends.

This is great news for Gadget and Mashup developers. We will definetely have some sample Gadgets and Mashups in a near future release using the newly 'liberated' GMail :)

The Enterprise OSGi spec is here ...

Enterprise OSGi spec rolls out at EclipseCon
At EclipseCon in Santa Clara, Calif., the OSGi Alliance announced approval of its long-brewing OSGi Enterprise Specification (Release 4, Version 4.2). This release of the OSGi bundled component standard is targeted at a broad group of Java application server developers. Greater modularity and increased component re-use are main OSGi goals.


WSO2 Gadget Server and WSO2 Mashup Server .next



The WSO2 Mashup Server, still the only true Free and Open Source Mashup platform in the industry will see its 2.1.0 release alongside Carbon 3.0.0 - Irridium. Highlights for this release include ...
  • Carbon 3.0.0 - Irridium as base platform
  • Hierarchical mashup deployment (mashups deployed under user work spaces)
  • New HTTP client Host Object to retrieve any resource over the internet, supplementing the Screen Scraper and WSRequest Host Objects and
  • numerous fixes and improvements as suggested by users in our forums 



We are almost there with version 1.1.0 release of the WSO2 Gadget Server and Nuwan, a key member of my team has done a nice round up of the latest features and improvements we've done for this release. To highlight ...
  • We are powered by Carbon 3.0.0 - Irridium
  • Latest stable revision of Apache Shindig
  • Pub/Sub and i18n for Gadgets and
  • HTTP mode portal (in case you haven't noticed we ran the portal on HTTPS in previous releases, which was not a must, since Gadgets themselves come from HTTP sources.)
I'm also working on an article explaining inter Gadget communication with pub/sub that I hope to publish in the WSO2 Oxygen Tank right in time for the release.

We are at the beta testing stages of the release cycle and are hoping to announce the final release within the next couple of weeks.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Add Gadgets to your blog

Step 1: Go to layout settings in your blogger.com blog and click "Add a Gadget".




Step 2: Click "Add your own" and type the gadget URL as http://gsdemo.wso2.org/registry/resource/system/gadgets/soa.xml

(This gadget is hosted in the WSO2 Gadget Server demo instance at http://gsdemo.wso2.org)




Step 3: Change gadget settings if required and click "Save".



Step 4: Save your layout. Now the latest posts from the SOA Platform Blog will be visible in your blog. And the beauty of this particular gadget is that your viewers can read the SOA Platform Blog's posts without leaving your blog :)




Wednesday, March 17, 2010

The Biz School Chronicles :: Hierarchy of Social Community Needs

Read the original article here.

Forrester analyst Nigel Fenwick makes a nice connection between Abraham Maslow's classical theory on the Human Hierarchy of Needs and the needs and aspirations of those who participate in today's on-line communities. At a glance the mapping looks like ....



The author recommends that those who develop/host such communities keep these motivational factors in mind and facilitate achieving them via;
  • Offering a mechanism for easy communication (e.g. micro-blogging).
  • Helping members to connect through rich profiles and profile search with friending.
  • Encouraging support by providing not only Q&A but also the ability to vote and reward contributions
  • Providing the ability to share ideas and to comment and add insight such as through virtual whiteboards, photos, video or a wiki-type content platform.
Good read!

Friday, March 12, 2010

Bill Gates No Longer World's Richest Man



India, China make mark on Forbes rich list / The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com
Eight Indians made Forbes magazine’s latest list of the top 100 billionaires, and two – energy tycoon Mukesh Ambani and steel mogul Lakshmi Mittal – sit in the top 5. Mr. Ambani is now the fourth richest person in the world, and the richest person in the Asia-Pacific region.