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Architecture / Re: OpenSAM
« on: June 07, 2007, 01:48:55 am »
I signed up for an invitation to test the alpha version of Microsoft Popfly (http://www.popfly.com) and got invited, so I've been playing around with it these last couple of days. The concept behind Popfly is interesting and I think we could apply something similar to the OpenGoo project. I still need to investigate it further, but the idea is something like this:
For example, in the first tutorial that they show you you use 3 blocks:
Ok, so the idea is to link the Twitter block to the VirtualEarth block by using the 'getLatestPosts' method to provide it with the image url, the title and description. Then link the Twitter block to the GeoNames to obtain the coordinates of the location returned by 'getLatestPosts', and link this to Virtual Earth to provide the last two parameters so that it can display the map. Finally you could add a Timer block to fetch the posts in regular intervals and so the webpage is always up to date.
I'm yet to see how to apply this to OpenGoo. For example, I don't see a need for a visual drag and drop interface to create the mashup in OpenGoo as it is conceived right now, since the mashup will be created by developers who know what they are doing, but may be we can allow some customization to the final user by using something similar to this. Or we could build a similar architecture to define how the different projects will interact - the ones we'll be merging and the future ones that want to integrate to OpenGoo.
Ok, that's it for now.
- a community of developers builds "blocks", which are javascript classes with methods that return either a Javascript object or some HTML to display.
- final users combine blocks, by linking the result of one block's method call with the input of another block's method, to build a webpage.
- this block combining is done via a drag and drop interface (in Silverlight of course).
For example, in the first tutorial that they show you you use 3 blocks:
- The first one has a 'getLatestPosts' method that fetches the latest posts from a site called Twitter. The fetched data includes username, a picture and the location of the person that made the post.
- The second block asks a site called GeoNames for the coordinates (latitude and longitude) of a given location
- The last block has a method which receives a couple of coordinates, a url for an image, a title and a description, and displays a map in VirtualEarth (Microsoft's version of GoogleEarth) that places the image at the location indicated by the coordinates, with the title and description provided.
Ok, so the idea is to link the Twitter block to the VirtualEarth block by using the 'getLatestPosts' method to provide it with the image url, the title and description. Then link the Twitter block to the GeoNames to obtain the coordinates of the location returned by 'getLatestPosts', and link this to Virtual Earth to provide the last two parameters so that it can display the map. Finally you could add a Timer block to fetch the posts in regular intervals and so the webpage is always up to date.
I'm yet to see how to apply this to OpenGoo. For example, I don't see a need for a visual drag and drop interface to create the mashup in OpenGoo as it is conceived right now, since the mashup will be created by developers who know what they are doing, but may be we can allow some customization to the final user by using something similar to this. Or we could build a similar architecture to define how the different projects will interact - the ones we'll be merging and the future ones that want to integrate to OpenGoo.
Ok, that's it for now.