FacebookPortlet

About this JA-SIG Portlet Project

Originally written in 2007 by Matt Young and Ren Provey of Duke University and presented in the 2007 JA-SIG conference.

Requirements for Usage

• While some modification of this portlet may in use at one or more institutions running an earlier version of uPortal, it may require significant additional work in coding/configuration to be functional.

Features

• lets you login to facebook via link to facebook login then kicks back into portal
• shows the following at top bar:
  • Friend Req.: 3
  • Event Invites: 0
  • New Messages: 2
  • Pokes: 0
  • Disconnect from Facebook (link)
  • Facebook.com (link)
• shows friend requests with their pictures and names (which link to profiles)

Notes

Discussion on portlet-dev on 5/20/2009:

• "Hi Cris, My understanding of the Duke FB portlet is that it displays a friend list with pictures and shows the notification count, buy Gary might be able to expand on the functionality a bit more than I. It also uses a login mechanism that only works in uP versions < 3.0, because it relies on a hack to allow the portlet to read the full query string. This hack doesn't work in uP 3.0 or greater and this is why I wrote the new version which uses the newer "Facebook Connect" login mechanism. Functionally, the new one doesn't display pictures of friends, but does show notifications and adds the ability to update your FB status. Hope that clears it up some." - Erik
• "Hi Erik, I believe the Duke FB portlet should actually work in uPortal 3.0.x, as of revision 43702 (last May)." - Jen
• "Hmm. I did extensive testing and couldn't get it to work on 3.0.1. It still relies on a dirty cast of PortletRequest to HttpServletRequest to get access to the query string when it does work. This was the only way to do it before Facebook Connect was released however, so it couldn't be avoided." -Erik

Usage Documentation

• FacebookPortlet User Manual

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Objectives and requirements

Functional

• Can retrieve facebook information and display information in a user friendly format

Technical

• Needs review: Is it a standards-compliant JSR-168 portlet?
• Needs review: Does it have what JA-SIG would consider to be modular design and APIs?
• Needs review: Uses Spring PortletMVC and appropriate Spring practices (It uses Spring, but haven't checked on PortletMVC or if Spring use is appropriate for uPortal.)
• Builds with Ant
• Needs (more) unit tests

Cultural

• A collaborative open source project under the auspices of JA-SIG
• Can be used commercially and non-commercially
• Produces actual production-ready releases, not just a code drop or a project that exclusively lives in SVN (Note: for now we would appreciate some help in this, and Jen of Yale offered to help until Duke has time to help develop it)

Participants

• ~bourey
• ~gary.weaver@duke.edu
• (feel free to add yourself here if you'd like to participate!)
• ...

Committers

Here are enumerated the people believed to be committers for this project:

• ~bourey
• ~gary.weaver@duke.edu
• (feel free to add yourself here if you'd like to contribute!)

Open Issues

Action Items