Experimenting with new Adobe Social service library

Adobe has recently unveiled their new social media library on Labs. It is a framework that allows user to connect to a several popular social media networks at once and get the information from the users profile, get a friends list, post updates, post news items etc… All in all pretty useful stuff. To get acquainted with this framework I made a little demo app that connects to twitter and facebook, get user’s profile info, enables to send simultaneous status update, and gets a list of friends.

Here are some of the things I noticed when playing with the package:

 Pros:

+ easy to implement (you don’t have to worry about parsing json, knowing REST api’s , authentication, asynchronous javascript loading / responses.. all of it is done behind the scenes for you.

+ easy to use :  The actual API itself is quite simple event based, not too many commands and parameters..

+ small in size : The file you need to embed (that acts as a framework proxy) has only about 9K!

Cons:

- reliability : This might be due to the fact this is still only a technology demo, or a connectivity issues, but I experienced quite a few connection problems (especially to a twitter api)

- features : Some things are not implemented (at least I didn’t see them). Like for example to get user’s last status update. You can change it / set it , but not get it ? Maybe this will be implemented later.. Or to get a news feed from Facebook.

 - strong typing of returned value objects : This bugged me quite a bit. You get a Response object for example that contains a several value objects such as User, Identity etc.. These objects doesn’t exist in the AS3 (client side of framework) though, although they probably exist as a typed value objects in PHP or some back-end language..(I saw them strongly typed in Flex debugger) So you have to code against a documentation, or create your own client side version of these objects (if you have time)..

 - authentication in separate html windows : there isn’t a way (or at least I didn’t see one) how to pass a user authentication data to a social network so you can log him/her automatically. The way it happens is that the new html window opens the user types in his/her login and then you get a callback and the new windows / tabs try to close automatically. This is a bit awkward, it would be much better if we could login user automatically and have a login interface in flash/flex once and then remember users login data (perhaps in SharedObject) and don’t ask for it every time he/she needs to connect..

Overal, despite couple of small problems, it’s seems like a great step forward to a unified share networks API that was till not virtualy non existant for a flash developers!