Software As She’s Developed

Mahemoff’s Podcast/Blog – Web, Programming, Usability from the Author of ‘Ajax Design Patterns’ (AjaxPatterns.org)

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Entries Tagged as 'Gadgets'

OpenSocial-Tiddlywiki Integration

September 3rd, 2008 · 2 Comments · SoftwareDev

Go straight to the demo.

I'm at the Osmosoft hackathon and finally got an opportunity to experiment with OpenSocial-Tiddlywiki integration. Specifically, how to embed OpenSocial gadgets in Tiddlywiki. I paired (trio'd?) up with Stuart Race and Tom D'Roza on it. We managed to get something useful up in an hour or two, which is testimony to [...]

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OpenSocial: A Beautiful Platform for Server-less Web Development

June 26th, 2008 · No Comments · SoftwareDev

It's belatedly dawned on me how OpenSocial makes a great server-less Ajax platform. When you create an OpenSocial gadget, you're building a lil Ajax app that performs much coolness that would normally require a server, but doesn't. Effectively, you're delegating the duties of the gadget's host environment. All you have to do is write a [...]

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Tools Europe – Pre-Workshop Preparation

June 22nd, 2008 · No Comments · SoftwareDev

I have the honour of delivering a keynote at the Tools Europe conference in Zurich next week, as well as at the "Mining Web 2.0 Patterns" workshop, which, as you can tell from its title, I'm looking forward to participating in. The workshop chairs are Dragos Manolescu and Joe Yoder.

The keynote is on OpenSocial, Gadgets, [...]

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What is OpenSocial?

June 22nd, 2008 · 1 Comment · SoftwareDev

I just realised there's no good executive summary for OpenSocial. Every resource fluffs about the "social" aspect and forgets about the UI aspect. The UI aspect, essentially a gadget specification, is just as important as the social aspect, notwithstanding its absence from the "OpenSocial" brand name. I'm not a fan of the name "OpenSocial" [...]

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Testing OpenSocial Apps – Current Challenges

April 16th, 2008 · No Comments · SoftwareDev

At present, the OpenSocial containers are new and the whole process is still quite difficult from a developer's perspective. These are unfortunate barriers to adoption which the containers could overcome with some redesign.

The challenges at present are:

Manual signup and approval process required. Even to get onto the sandbox area, you have to go [...]

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Cross-Domain Communication with IFrames

March 31st, 2008 · 81 Comments · Links, SoftwareDev

This article explains iframe-to-iframe communication, when the iframes come from different domains. That you can do this effectively is only now becoming apparent to the community, and is now used in production by Google, Facebook, and others, and has powerful implications for the future of Ajax, mashups, and widgets/gadgets. I've been investigating the technique and [...]

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Shindig Architecture: Java Gadget Server 2 – Servlets

February 26th, 2008 · No Comments · Links, SoftwareDev

More raw Shindig notes. This time, looking at org.apache.shindig.gadgets.http. See Shindigging tag. I'll structure them just a little more this time.

Main Servlet

BasicHttpContext.java - data struct for country/language/locale

GadgetRenderingServlet.java - The servlet that accepts gadget spec URL and prefs, and outputs the gadget content (typically in an iframe). Delegates heavily to GadgetServer, in order to get a [...]

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Shindig Architecture: Java Gadget Classes

February 25th, 2008 · 1 Comment · Links, SoftwareDev

This is the first of an open series on the architecture of Shindig, the new open-source gadget/widget framework project. As mentioned here earlier, this project is building something similar to iGoogle, i.e. an environment for serving gadgets, a run-time environment for the gadgets to operate in, and a gadget container (as well as OpenSocial support).

I'm [...]

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Widget/Gadget Containers: What are they good for?

February 4th, 2008 · 3 Comments · SoftwareDev

Ajax, AjaxPatterns, Gadgets, OpenSocial, Shindig, Web, Web 2.0, Widgets

Background

Widgets are small "mini websites", typically self-contained blocks of content, on a larger web page (with Ajax Design Patterns, I referred to them by the nom du jour Portlets). They are used in a couple of ways:

Embedded in a normal web page. For example, my [...]

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Where Do Widgets Come From? A Look at Widget/Gadget Content Types

February 1st, 2008 · 1 Comment · Links, SoftwareDev

Ajax, AjaxPatterns, Gadgets, Google, Web, Web 2.0, Widgets

Background

A while back, I walked through a Google Gadget I made called Digg Roundup, which simply shows Digg headlines and can be customised on topic and popularity. In my quest for an uber-simple tutorial, one thing I skipped on was content type, the subject of the present muttering. [...]

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