Shindig is an open source reference implementation of Google’s OpenSocial and gadgets specifications. With Shindig, you will be able to host Google gadgets and OpenSocial applications in your own web site relatively quickly as it already contains code that you can easily plug into your server infrastructure to start hosting these applications.

Interested with OpenSocial, I tried installing Shindig in my home server. Currently, Shindig’s PHP implementation is far from being complete, so my interest is just to have a feel on how it works. To install Shindig, check its web site and follow the instructions there. The project does not yet support automated build infrastructure so you need to get Shindig from its SVN repository. For this, you need an SVN client. Fortunately, I have Cygwin installed in my Windows XP machine, so I only had to install subversion in Cygwin. This can be done by running the Cygwin installer, then locate the subversion package, select it, and install. After the installation, run a bash shell and you are ready to export Shindig.

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