When it came down to it, this book had to target one approach—either open source initiatives or a single proprietary container implementation. The reason this book covers the open standards approach for social application containers and development is because it is not tied to any one container. I didn’t want to limit the scope of this text to a single proprietary platform that could change on a whim and may contain a shallow view of the social web.

My main goals are to provide an overview of the creation and use of a social application container and how applications are built on top of those containers. The concepts behind open source projects are solidly based in the state of the social web, regardless of whether any single container implements all of the features included within a particular open source project.