Programming Social Applications

The OpenSocial Gadget XML Specification

While Shindig and Partuza are tools for building an OpenSocial container, the gadget XML specification is a tool for building application gadgets to run within a container. This XML specification file contains a series of configuration settings and data that allows the container to load the application content and information.

A gadget XML file contains a few main nodes (or elements). The root Module node contains three child nodes, ModulePrefs, UserPref, and a series of Content nodes. ModulePrefsk defines the characteristics (metadata) about the application, UserPref allows gadgets to define user-specific data, and the Content nodes contain the code for the gadget views.

This is the standard format of a gadget XML file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Module>
    <ModulePrefs ... />
    <UserPref ... />
    <Content ...>
        Gadget Content
    </Content>
</Module>

In the sections that follow, we’ll explore the content of each node and the possible configurations for building out a gadget.