OpenSocial Celebrates 1st year Anniversary in Tokyo with new technical innovations

On November 25, 2008, Japanese OpenSocial developers and enthusiasts gathered at the Google office in Tokyo, Japan to for an OpenSocial Summit and a celebration of OpenSocial's first birthday.

This event featured several presentations on OpenSocial technology followed by a special meet and greet session where attendees mingled and got a chance to share their OpenSocial technology innovations.

OpenSocial Birthday Event

The event had approximately 30 attendees who represented Japan's OpenSocial pioneers and experts, including engineers and architects from Mixi, Gumi, Recruit, NTT Resonant (goo home), Myspace Japan, Tejimaya (OpenPNE), Sixapart, and API Gurus.

Noaki Ishihara and Chris Schalk, OpenSocial developer advocates at Google, kicked off the event with presentations. Naoki provided an update on the status of OpenSocial today and Chris provided a technical update on OpenSocial with special coverage on the upcoming version 0.9.

The presentations are available here:
Naoki Ishihara: "Status of OpenSocial".
Chris Schalk: "OpenSocial: A Technical Update".

At the end of the presentations, everyone commemorated OpenSocial's first year with birthday cake and refreshments. During the birthday celebration, the attendees got a chance to show off some their recent OpenSocial work.



Some noteworthy OpenSocial technologies innovations in the event were:

Gumi's New OpenSocial Mobile Platform

A refreshing surprise from the event was Gumi's new operational OpenSocial Mobile platform that uses both OpenSocial v0.8 and its RESTful protocol, along with Google App Engine for hosting.



Gumi's founders were very happy to show us a running instance of a social game that uses the RESTful protocol on their mobile phones.



In addition to using OpenSocial's RESTful protocol, Gumi's architecture also uses Google App Engine as a back-end server!

New Eclipse Plugin for OpenSocial application development!

One of Japan's OpenSocial experts, Yoichiro Tanaka, also surprised us at the birthday celebration with a new Eclipse plugin that aids in the development of OpenSocial applications. The OpenSocial Development Environment (OSDE), provides a complete IDE based environment for developing and testing OpenSocial applications, all from within the Eclipse development environment as opposed to always having to develop applications from a live container sandbox such as orkut, hi5 etc.



In addition to providing helpful IDE features to aid in development of an social application, applications can also be tested directly inside of Eclipse. This is possible because the plugin comes bundled with a local copy of Java Shindig For more information on OSDE, see: http://www.eisbahn.jp/trac/osde

As this event has shown, OpenSocial development and innovation is thriving in Japan! Thank you to the excellent and creative Japanese OpenSocial developer community!
For Japanese OpenSocial content see:
OpenSocial Japan Google group: http://groups.google.com/group/opensocial-japan?hl=ja&lnk=
OpenSocial documentation localized in Japanese http://code.google.com/intl/ja/apis/opensocial/

For general OpenSocial content, see:
OpenSocial wiki: http://wiki.opensocial.org

Chris Schalk, Naoki Ishihara, and Takuya Oikawa, Google Developer Relations