ActivityPub is the new standard for connecting social networks together on the social web. This open, decentralized social networking protocol defines an API for sharing activities to a social network and a procedure that servers use to distribute those activities to a subscriber’s feed. With this book, you’ll learn how to assemble ActivityPub-enabled clients for making new kinds of social apps on top of existing networks and build ActivityPub servers that create new human or automated accounts on the social web. With those skills under your belt, you can explore other applications of this publish-subscribe technology: content management systems, Internet of Things, and enterprise automation. With hands-on examples and in-depth knowledge from Evan Prodromou, one of the authors of the protocol, this is the ActivityPub handbook that every social software hacker needs. This book uses many examples in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), JavaScript, and Python. Each language gets a brief description when it is introduced, but familiarity with JSON as a data format, and JavaScript and Python as programming languages, will be a big help in understanding the examples. However, I try not to use too many fancy features of each language, so if you’re familiar with any modern programming language, you should be able to puzzle out the examples. It can help to be familiar with the architecture of the web, including how Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) works and how Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) pages are developed. Experience with application programming interfaces (APIs), especially APIs for social networks like X or Facebook, can be helpful to understand the motivation for some examples but isn’t strictly required. This book is primarily for software developers interested in creating ActivityPub client or server software. It could also be useful for software architects or designers who are considering how to structure an ActivityPub-centric project.

ActivityPub: Programming (Final Release) PDF

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