Tag Archives: application

An Orkut Application via a JSON API

I talked about delegating rendering in Symfony for creating a JSON API. Now here’s a consumer: an Orkut opensocial gadget:


MobshareOrkutAPI = {

	api_url: 'http://api.mobshare/api.php',
	cache_time: 0, //0 to disable

	makeCachedRequest: function(url, callback, params, refreshInterval) {
	  var ts = new Date().getTime();
	  var sep = "?";
	  if (refreshInterval && refreshInterval > 0) {
	    ts = Math.floor(ts / (refreshInterval * 1000));
	  }
	  if (url.indexOf("?") > -1) {
	    sep = "&";
	  }
	  url = [ url, sep, "nocache=", ts ].join("");
	  gadgets.io.makeRequest(url, callback, params);
	},

	call: function(module, action, params, callback) {
		var options = {};
		options[gadgets.io.RequestParameters.CONTENT_TYPE] = gadgets.io.ContentType.JSON;
		this.makeCachedRequest(this.api_url + '/' + module + '/' + action + '?' + params, callback, options, this.cache_time);
	}

};

makeCachedRequest has been plaigarized from the Opensocial documentation and it’s very useful to bust the cache for requests. Also, notice this line for setting the content-type to JSON:


options[gadgets.io.RequestParameters.CONTENT_TYPE] = gadgets.io.ContentType.JSON;

This is how we access that API, a code fragment:


...
authenticate: function(alias, mobile_no, password) {
	MobshareOrkutAPI.call('user', 'authenticate',
		'alias=' + encodeURIComponent(alias) + '&mobile_no=' + encodeURIComponent(mobile_no) +
			'&password=' + encodeURIComponent(password),
 		MyOrkutApp.login
	);
}
...
login: function(orkut_response) {
	response = orkut_response.data;
	data_success = response['success'];
	data_error = response['error'];

	if(data_success) {
		html = '<h2>Login Successful!</h2>';
		html += '<p>Welcome: ' + data_success.name + '!</p>';
	} else if(data_error) {
		html = '<h2>Login Unsuccessful!</h2>';
		html += '<p>' + data_error + '!</p>';
	}

	document.getElementById('mobshare_login').innerHTML += html;
},
...

Note that orkut_response.data is automatically set by Orkut because you passed in the JSON content type; it parses the data received and creates a javascript object. Cool, ain’t it? It’s very easy to create a proper interactive Opensocial app this way.

Adobe AIR: Calculator

If you’ve installed the AIR SDK (and it’s dead easy, just extract and copy it somewhere), you’ve got a lightweight cross-plaform VM to program apps in. Best of all, it works with HTML and Javascript.

In about an hour, I hitched up a calculator application. It’s very easy:

Calculator.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<application xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/1.0.M4"
	appId="in.vish.Calculator"
	version="1.0">
	<name>Calculator</name>
	<title>Calculator Installer</title>
	<description>Simple Calculator in HTML</description>
	<copyright></copyright>
	<rootContent systemChrome="standard" transparent="false" visible="true">
		Calculator.html
	</rootContent>
</application>

Calculator.html:

<!DOCTYPE html
     PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
     "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
	<title>Calculator</title>
	<style>
		body, html { margin: 0; padding: 0; }
		body { background-color: black; color: #888; line-height: 1.5em;
			font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif;
		}
		#wrap { margin: auto; width: 70%; }
		h1 { font-family: Tahoma, Arial, serif; font-size:2em; color: orange; }
		#sum_button { margin-top: 5px; }
	</style>
	<script>
		init = function() {
			runtime.trace("init function called");
		}
		calculate = function() {
			runtime.trace("calculate called!");
			value1 = document.getElementById('val1').value;
			value2 = document.getElementById('val2').value;
			sum_value = parseInt(value1) + parseInt(value2);
			if (isNaN(sum_value)) {
				document.getElementById('result').innerHTML = "You didn't enter valid numbers.";
			} else {
				document.getElementById('result').innerHTML = "The sum is " + sum_value + ".";
			}
		}
		resetForm = function() {
			runtime.trace("resetForm called!");
			document.getElementById('sum').reset();
		}
	</script>
</head>
<body onload="init()">
	<div id="wrap">
		<h1>Calculate a Sum!</h1>
		<form id="sum">
			<label for="val1">Value 1:
				<input type="text" name="val1" id="val1" size="4"/>
			</label>
			<label for="val2">Value 2:
				<input type="text" name="val2" id="val2" size="4"/>
			</label>
			<input type="button" value="Sum!" id="sum_button" onclick="calculate();">
			<input type="button" value="Reset" onclick="resetForm();">
			<p id="result"></p>
		</form>
	</div>
</body>
</html>

And voila, there you have it: a simple calculator:

There’s also a zip file with the code: calculator.zip and the AIR file for installation (to use that you need the AIR runtime)