Just putting some finishing touches on my Developer Jam item.
Well a bit of background... What is the Big Social?
That's our 2011 Telligent Conference that kicks off next week in Dallas... (http://telligent.com/bigsocial/)
What is a Developer Jam?
During the conference, we will have some development workstations setup for devs to get their hands dirty exploring some new features of our 6.0 Platform.
My Developer Jam session is titled "Create a widget extension plug-in to integrate with an external site"
Widget "plugins" are these powerful little classes that expose the public properties and methods of an existing class to our velocity rendering engine, so you can use your custom class in our widget framework... At my station you will create a plug-in that exposes some prewritten code to extend the platforms capability.
I have one sample, pretty straight forward which pulls in TweetStharps API (wrappered by a custom business logic class); this sample shows how easily you can "pull in" data from external sources...
But it doesn't stop there, to truly integrate, you want to go one step further, to do this I have taken the MSDN Code Gallery sample app (CSASPNETAJAXWebChat) and wrapped the WCF class as a plug-in. This allowed me to re-implement the UI with a couple of Telligent widgets, and create a Chat Application for Telligent Evolution 6.0. This can be easily extended with some business logic to extend the chat to other public API's like IRC or Skype with some minor authentication work and a background service to manage the data flow outside of the ASP.NET page life-cycle.
The widgets themselves would still benefit from a "Long Polling" javascript strategy to make the updating of the web client more efficentthan polling; and the chat contents should probably have a mechanism to get archived into a search-able location (like a forum thread) on a periodic basis, but its a good start to show the integration capabilities of our new platform; come check it out!
-Dan