The Pluck 4 Social Application Server

The industry’s first social application server, the Pluck 4 Social Application Server enables organizations to positively impact speed to market and deployment flexibility, while extending end user reach via search, social bridging, mobile and more, from within a proven scalable technology foundation.  The Pluck 4 Social Application Server is designed to simplify and generalize the process of building and deploying online social applications. At the same time, it provides a rock-solid enterprise platform for these applications, offering the reliability, scalability and usability that enterprises demand.

In offering customizability for professionals with basic web development skills, Pluck’s Social Application Server provides a host of services and components that relieve web developers of everything except the business-level features and operations of their online social experience.  Pluck’s Social Application Server provides an extensible, template-based mechanism for adding functionality to Pluck’s off-the-shelf product, while allowing enterprises to take advantage of all of the existing functionality of the Pluck applications.

Additionally, the Pluck 4 Social Application Server includes a powerful scripting engine allowing complete customization using Pluck’s extensive data model to modify existing applications or innovate completely new social applications. The robust scripting infrastructure provides a powerful scripting environment similar to other scripting environments your developers have used, so the chances are good that you already have the experience necessary to be productive.

Pluck 4 Empowers Enterprises
The Pluck 4 Social Application Server allows you to quickly integrate social applications into your site by embedding simple JavaScript Tags in your existing site templates, or by invoking simple server to server RESTful calls in your web server for search engine optimization.

The social applications you integrate can be out of the box applications provided by Pluck or entirely new applications created and innovated by you. Either way, web designers and web developers can quickly extend or modify the application’s presentation layer using Pluck’s powerful  themes based on a familiar set of web building blocks—HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Images. Themes allow you to quickly localize the applications and fit the applications into your site real-estate, site vernacular, and site look and feel.

Each application served by the Pluck 4 Social Application Server supports the output formats XHTML, XML, and JSON allowing you to take advantage of the application output on a variety of endpoints. Additionally, you can leverage Pluck’s simple template language to modify or create the application output formats allowing you to serve multiple endpoints—web browser, mobile device, desktop client.

Web designers and developers have Pluck’s extensive social data model at their fingertips to support in the customization of existing applications or the creation of entirely new applications. The data model is accessible through a powerful scripting engine. Web developers can reuse scripts across multiple applications, sharing scripts with common tasks and common business functions. In addition, familiar frameworks are available in the scripting language allowing web developers to easily parse XML, access web resources, persist data, and more, ensuring fast development time.

The Pluck 4 Social Application Server is built on a long history of proven scalability, reliability, and performance. This is made possible through Pluck’s embedded high performance caching, storage architecture, shared memory implementation, clustering, and reliable network architecture.

Pluck 4 Social Application Server – Components
The Pluck 4 Social Application Server provides a primary set of components to the application layer. Application developers can leverage these components to extend existing applications, create new applications, or support legacy Pluck modules.
 
Authentication & Authorization
Pluck 4 provides a comprehensive authentication and authorization layer for the application developers to take advantage of. Authentication is handled by an SSO component that ensures all inbound write requests are made by an authenticated user before allowing execution. Customers can configure the system to allow for anonymous writes. The SSO component can be configured to leverage a customer registration and authentication system or to use Pluck’s built in authentication system. Authorization is handled by a user tier model where all executing users are associated with a pre-defined user tier (e.g. trusted, standard, and anonymous). Each user tier has a static set of rights and privileges in the system and authorization is determined at runtime based on the user tier of the requesting user.
 
Extensible RESTful Interface
Pluck 4 leverages a standard REST interface for application invocation. Applications can be embedded in web pages via client-side JavaScript tags which makes RESTful calls to Pluck 4 or via direct server to server or client to server RESTful calls. The RESTful interface is completely extensible, allowing new applications created by the customer to be invoked client-side or server-side.
 
Presentation Engine
Pluck 4 provides a powerful presentation engine giving the customer full control of the format and look and feel of application output. The presentation engine supports an easy to use template language that allows web designers and web developers to completely customize the application output to their liking. This includes customization of application output to any output type, including by default XHTML, JSON, and XML for every application. Using the capabilities of the presentation engine customers can create applications to serve multiple endpoints (e.g. web browsers and mobile devices) and multiple locales (e.g. French, Italian, German, and Spanish). Each application’s presentation layer dependencies are bundled into a standard application bundle, containing HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, and more. Customers can quickly and easily override components of an application bundle or completely define a new application bundle to render a custom theme.
 
Scripting Engine
Pluck 4 provides application developers with a powerful Python-based scripting engine. Frameworks and standard interfaces are provided allowing application developers to perform common tasks like XML parsing, accessing web resources, persisting data, and more. The scripting engine provides full access to the broad social data model, giving application developers the ability to extend existing application functionality or create entirely new application functionality and applications.
 
Content Access API (CAAPI)
Pluck has a long history of providing API access to the core data model. This history is maintained with Pluck 4’s Content Access API. The Content Access API provides a complete read/write programming interface to the broad social data model. Application developers use CAAPI in the scripting engine to retrieve social data or write new social data to the underlying data store. CAAPI provides common interfaces with standard error codes ensuring a small learning curve for application developers.
 
Data Model
Pluck 4 is built upon a broad social data model, covering 12 social categories and 120+ objects. Social categories covered include blogs, comments, forums, groups, personas, reviews, and more. The entire data model is exposed to application developers through CAAPI in the scripting engine.
 
Legacy APIs
Pluck 4 continues support for legacy Pluck interfaces including DAAPI, JavaScript, REST, and Content Download. Customers upgrading to Pluck 4 can be assured that existing Pluck modules and custom code will continue to operate and function properly. Over time, Pluck will be deprecating support for legacy interfaces with a preference towards migrating customers to the more powerful Pluck 4 platform.

3rd Party Components
Pluck also utilizes the following 3rd party components within the social application server:

• Lucene (Search, Content Access API)
• Berkley DB (Platform, Storage)
• SQLite (Platform, Storage)
• IronPython (Platform, Application Scripting)
• NVelocity (Platform, Application View Rendering)
• .NET (Platform)
• Log4net (Platform, Application Script Logging)