Question

I am trying to embed an opensocial gadget into a email. But I don’t know where to get start. I searched the opensocial wiki and cannot find my answer. I am still puzzled who will take responsibility to render the gadget in the email and how it works, and also how to deal with the javascript cross domain issue in a gadget or container(if needed)?

Answer 1

(Sorry for all the weird links, but StackOverflow won’t let me reference more than 2 links in a single post.)

The best place to go to understand how this use case works from a gadget perspective is on the OpenSocial Wiki[1]. In OpenSocial we call the functionality you describe embedded experiences. The embedded experiences tutorial[2] will be the most help to you. You also want to read through the embedded experiences section of the OpenSocial Spec[3]. Basically what you need to do in order to embed and OpenSocial gadget in an email is to add another MIME part you your multipart MIME email with the MIME type of application/embed+json or application/embed+xml and put the XML or JSON data model described in the spec in the body of that MIME part.

Mail clients which support embedded experiences will look for these MIME types and can then render the OpenSocial gadget. Obviously the mail client needs to take into consideration various security concerns related to embedding gadgets in emails but how these concerns are addressed will be different from container to container and should not be of concern to the gadget itself. The Apache Shindig project[4] provides a reference implementation for embedded experiences. The OpenSocial Spec group[5] and the Apache Shindig mailing list[6] is probably the best place for future questions on this topic.

I have created some demo videos which demonstrate embedded experiences in IBM Lotus Notes and iNotes[7] as well as the OpenSocial 2.0 Sandbox[8].

1.)http://docs.opensocial.org

2.)http://docs.opensocial.org/display/OSREF/Embedded+Experiences+Tutorial

3.)http://opensocial-resources.googlecode.com/svn/spec/2.0.1/Core-Gadget.xml#Embedded-Experiences

4.)http://shindig.apache.org/

5.)https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/opensocial-and-gadgets-spec

6.)http://shindig.apache.org/mail-lists.html

8.)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IaBzt-9_TM

9.)http://sandbox.opensocial2.org:8080/collabapp/index.html