Quick Start Guide

Usage

Sunspear provides a very simple api managing activity stream items

Initialize

You initialize sunspear by providing sunspear.clients.SunspearClient with an instance of a backend. All backends are located in sunspear.backends and extend the sunspear.backend.base.BaseBackend:

from sunspear.backends.RiakBackend import RiakBackend
from sunspear.clients import SunspearClient

import datetime

client = SunspearClient(RiakBackend(**{
    "host_list": [{'port': 8087}],
    "defaults": {'host': '127.0.0.1'},
}))

Create Objects

Once you have a reference to the SunspearClient, you can, create objects:

obj = client.create_object({
    "objectType": "user"
    "displayName": "John Doe",
    "email": "jdoe@gmail.com",
    "id": "user:1234",
})

Note

If you do not specify the id of an object, one will be automatically generated for you. This also applies for the published date.

Create Activity

You can also create an activity. As per the JSON Activity Stream 1.0 specifications, an activity must have a verb, actor and an object.

Creating an activity for:

John Doe created the team "Marketing"

may look something like this:

activity = client.create_activity({
    "verb": "create",
    "actor": "user:1234",
    "object": {
        "objectType": "team",
        "displayName": "Marketing",
    },
})

Couple of intresting things to note here:

1. We used the id for the actor instead of the full blown object because we created the object earlier.
2. We didn’t specify an id for our team object. One will be automatically generated.
3. The verb is arbratry. It can be anything except for response and activity summary verbs. For list a list of common verbs and objects you may want to use, see the Activity Base Schema.
4. create_activity returns the fully parsed activity.

Note

The reason you can’t use response and activity summary verbs is because Sunspear uses some of them internally.

Create Responses

You can create responses to activities such as liking an activity or replying to an activity. Sunspear supports a few of the response types described here.

All methods that create responses, return the newly created response activity and the original activity the response was created for with the response activity embedded.

Note

Sunspear does responses a little bit differently than what is describe in the specifications.

Responses themselves are fully fledged activities and not objects. This was untimatly done to provide maximum flexibility.

Create a Reply

You can create replies to activities.

reply_activity, original_activity = client.create_reply(activity['id'], "user:1234",
    "This is my Reply!")

Create a Like

You can like activities.

like_activity, original_activity = client.create_like(activity['id'], "user:1234")

Delete Reply

original_activity = client.delete_reply(reply_activity["id"])

Delete Like

original_activity = client.delete_like(reply_activity["id"])

Get Activities

You can get activities by providing a list of ids.

client.get_activities([activity["id"], "1234", "3456"])

Note

If the activity with the id does not exist, it is simply ignored.

Get Objects

You can get objects by providing a list of ids.

client.get_objects([obj["id"], "1234", "3456"])

Note

If the object with the id does not exist, it is simply ignored.