Building Social Web Clients

You see them everywhere: "Like" buttons, "Tweet" buttons, and now there are "+1" buttons. The social networks have extended their reach beyond their own websites and into almost every web site you visit. But did you know that these simple little buttons are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to adding social features to your website?

Several of the popular social networks (including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) provide client-side APIs that enable you to build social capabilities into you application. With these APIs, your application can not only show a simple button for your users to express their opinion, but can also let you query information about their profile, friends, interests, and much more.

In this example-driven presentation, we'll examine the client-side APIs offered by Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We'll dig even deeper than the "Like" button as we see how the APIs can be used to build rich social applications.

About Craig Walls

Craig Walls has been professionally developing software for almost 18 years (and longer than that for the pure geekiness of it). He is a senior engineer with SpringSource as the Spring Social project lead and is the author of Spring in Action and XDoclet in Action (both published by Manning) and Modular Java (published by Pragmatic Bookshelf). He's a zealous promoter of the Spring Framework, speaking frequently at local user groups and conferences and writing about Spring and OSGi on his blog. When he's not slinging code, Craig spends as much time as he can with his wife, two daughters, 4 birds and 3 dogs.

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