DiSo Project

DiSo is built on the idea of implementing social networking concepts on existing standards where possible. One of those standards is XRDS Simple, a service description and discovery format that is a part of several recent and upcoming standards including OpenID and OAuth.

Since last week, when I released the first version of XRDS-Simple for Movable Type, there’s been some more movement in the implementation space:

• James Walker announced a plugin for Drupal that works similarly to Stephen’s WordPress plugin and my own MT plugin – it provides a framework for apps to register services to be advertised in the XRDS doc. We now have
• Byrne Reese kindly helped me re-package the MT plugin for better distribution (per MT standard practice), then went a step further and contributed some code improvements to make it play more nicely with Yahoo’s OpenID implementation.

There’s also talk of rolling OpenID delegation (currently one of the most common use of XRDS) into a couple of the plugins, and we’re also on the lookout for more services that are using, might use, or should be using XRDS for service discovery. We (and by “we” I mean the DiSo community) are also looking for XRDS parser implementations that can be used in integration and interop testing. Some brief Googling turned up parsers in:

• Python (from mr topf)
• Ruby (elc tech)

If you’ve got pointers to other implementations (providing or consuming), or other thoughts, hit us up in the comments.

Update: In doing some reading it looks like a working Yadis parser (like those found in several OpenID implementations) may also work for parsing the XRDS-Simple output by these generators. Any confirmation/corrections are welcome.