Messageboard support?

[Erik]

Suppose I wanted to implement a message board gadget. what datatype
would use?

[Chris Chabot]

Hey Erik,

Could you please elaborate on your question? To be honest it doesn't make a lot of sense.

The 'datatype' completely depends on the design of what you want to store, and what language your talking about ... in sql you probably would make a title a varchar(X), and the post a blob (or text in mysql), the user id a int ... but in C++ you would most certainly want to use a char *, while in scripting languages a string is a one-size-fits-all type of solution.. In other words without any background to what your asking, the question just doesn't make any sense.

Nor do I really understand what the correlation is with OpenSocial?

Anyhow, I hope you can give us a bit more info so we can attempt to answer

   -- Chris

[Erik Earle]

Context would help, sorry. As I think about it, this probably the
wrong group, but I'lll ask anyway.

Hypothetically, let say I'm building a site for ...Mercedes Benz.
For part of their site redesign, they want the ability to have
messageboards where the topics are posted videos and pictures (some
mercedes produced content and users posting videos and images of their
cars). Then other guests can comment on the postings.

We are looking at shindig for managing the social graph but it has
also been suggested to me that the messageboard information be stored
in the appdata type. This seems to me a misuse of Appdata and
something like messageboard posts would best be stored by a system to
external an open social implementation.

Am I missing something, or would this type of site require the
integration of a message board application with something like
Shindig?

[Chris Chabot]

App Data can be abused for a lot of things, but many containers limit the max size of it to 10kb per app/user.. so storing all the info of a forum in it would quickly run into this limit.

So unfortunately you can't really escape setting up your own server, of course you could set up your own, but a lot of people have also had a lot of success with using something like Google App Engine, Amazon EC2, Joyent.com etc as a back-end for gadgets, which allows you to code in pretty much any back-end language you'd want and scale as your app becomes popular, so there's various ways of doing this depending on your requirements and expertise.

   -- Chris

[Erik Earle]

Thanks Chris. We are in the process of deploying Shindig. We are
using the sample JPA implementation (with Hibernate). I'm assuming
with an implementation like Shindig, the limit is based on the
datastore design?