WideLens

Page Status: Beta

WideLens is a Bungee Connect’s reference calendaring web application. WideLens serves both as a commercial-grade application, as well as as a model for how you can extend any application built on the Bungee Connect platform.

Contents

[edit] About WideLens

WideLens goals:

  • Demonstrate the kind of application that can be developed using Bungee Connect: highly interactive, secure and scalable web applications connecting to and leveraging multiple, distributed web services (REST/POX and SOAP) and relational data stores (e.g. SQL databases such as MySQL or PostgreSQL)
  • Motivate Bungee developers to work through the required learning curve because they are inspired by WideLens as a reference application - the application can be imported into a Bungee developer's own workspace, modified and deployed as their own application or just used as a learning tool
  • Leverage WideLens to educate developers on how to extend and customize an existing Bungee application, illustrating Bungee development best practices and design patterns using WideLens as an example
  • Encourage developer community activity, e.g. kick-start collaborative development projects among Bungee devs who want to work together to build WideLens derivative Bungee apps

[edit] Providing Connectivity to Multiple Types of External Data

WideLens connects to Microsoft Exchange calendar, Google Calendar, Salesforce.com, Facebook, MySQL and iCalendar feeds. If you’re familiar with these services, you know this list isn’t just a mouthful to say, it represents a variety of protocols and authentication schemes. MS Exchange is accessed through WebDav, Google Calendar through gData, Salesforce.com via SOAP, Facebook through REST and MySQL connectivity is based on client libraries provided by MySQL (integrated directly inside Bungee Connect).

WeekView

WideLens connects to each of the sources in real-time, presenting the user with live data. With the exception of Facebook and iCalendar, users can create and modify events and those changes are immediately posted back to the source.MySQL pulls double duty, serving as both a WideLens native calendar source and as the persistence layer for all kinds of application data including user preferences and credential information for each service.

Due to the sensitivity of calendar data, user credentials for each type of service are encrypted before being stored into the database. Credentials can only be unlocked with the users password, not stored in the database. If they forget their password they will need to re-enter all their credential information for each service.This list of services was chosen to demonstrate to variety of ways Bungee Connect can leverage existing data in applications and the accelerated way in which a developer can integrate that data into their application. To provide some perspective, once the base calendar was functional it took only 3 hours of development time to integrate Salesforce.com and only 1 day to integrate Facebook.

[edit] WideLens Resources

[edit] Blog Posts

[edit] Technical Articles

[edit] Videos

[edit]  BCDN Forum - WideLens topics

[edit] Release Notes

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