The common rendering engine (CRE) is a shared component that provides the support framework for rendering widgets in IBM software applications. Widget is a collective term that describes both iWidgets and OpenSocial gadgets.

You can extend the functionality of the Home page application by adding custom widgets. To make the widgets available for use in the Home page, you need to add the widgets from the Administration view and then enable them for use.

By default, IBM® Connections uses the gadget administration store and limits the access of gadgets to the OpenSocial container based on feature access and remote procedure call (RPC) arbitration.

Whenever users can interact with data from thirdparty applications and external services, security measures should be put in place to prevent unwanted access.

As you design and code widgets, use the following general best practices as a guideline:

The following topics cover best practices for developing and designing highly functional widgets with optimal performance.

Watch this tutorial on how embedded experiences to the OpenSocial 2.0 sandbox.

This video shows how you can embed gadgets on a web page.

In this lesson, you will learn the basics of the XML code that makes up a gadget.

After creating an event in the last module, this module begins with a lesson to configure the data model to control how the gadget renders.

OAuth is an open standardbased security architecture and protocol. This guide helps you integrate your application OAuth with the IBM® Social Business Toolkit.

Use the following sample scenarios to understand how you can use the IBM® Social Business Toolkit to build a better user experience:

A new Apache Shindig feature is now available that allows gadgets to render inline while keeping the impact to the Shindig core as small as possible.

In this lesson, see an example of a common Open Authorization (OAuth) consumer implementation. The example is based on an open source Java™ library that is available on the OAuth website. The OAuth Java library is covered under the Apache 2.0 license agreement.

Now that you understand the basic structure of a gadget, you learn to build the OpenSocial travel gadget to render your event model.

In this lesson, you enable the embedded experience in the activity stream, by creating a place in the data model for the OpenSocial gadget and linking them together.

See the following sections to learn how to use the IBM® Social Business Toolkit test environment on Lotus® Greenhouse Labs.

Use the following sample scenario to understand how you can use the IBM® Social Business Toolkit to build a better user experience:

The following scenario demonstrates how document notification and commenting might be used with the IBM® Social Business Toolkit to allow users to review and comment on documents directly from their activity streams:

In this module, you learn how to build an event model for your experience.

In this lesson, use the sample OpenSocial gadgets that are included with the IBM® Social Business Toolkit on Lotus Greenhouse Labs to create and post a simple status update to your activity stream. A status update is just one type of event that you can post to the activity stream.

Social networking has become a popular tool in the consumer world with such sites as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, and more. Although each site has its own unique characteristics, a common denominator is an aggregation of activities that are personalized for the user and then dynamically ...

The public API provided by this first phase of the IBM® Social Business Toolkit is an implementation of the ActivityStrea.ms data model and serialization formats extending the OpenSocial Activities API format to submit and retrieve events.

In this lesson, you learn how to build a basic OpenSocial gadget with XML.

The following topics contain information about the APIs that are related to social business.