Software As She’s Developed

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 […]

[Read more →]

I made a little music mashup you might enjoy using. A Little Music As I was playing around with the new layout of this blog, I added a Last.FM widget to the sidebar. It looks like this: table.lfmWidgetradioeef448421daa7cdb759397e5f8ea67f8 td {margin:0 !important;padding:0 !important;border:0 !important;}table.lfmWidgetradioeef448421daa7cdb759397e5f8ea67f8 tr.lfmHead a:hover {background:url(http://cdn.last.fm/widgets/images/en/header/radio/minired.png) no-repeat 0 0 !important;}table.lfmWidgetradioeef448421daa7cdb759397e5f8ea67f8 tr.lfmEmbed object {float:left;}table.lfmWidgetradioeef448421daa7cdb759397e5f8ea67f8 tr.lfmFoot td.lfmConfig a:hover {background:url(http://cdn.last.fm/widgets/images/en/footer/red.png) no-repeat [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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. [...]

[Read more →]

This is the third in the four-part series on Ajax functionality and usability patterns (Book: Part 4, pp 327-530). An audio discussion of visual effects is ideally short and sweet, so this podcast is but 13 minutes long. This 13-minute podcast covers ten patterns of Ajax Architecture (Book: Chapter 16, pp 445-472): One-Second Spotlight One-Second Mutation One-Second Motion Highlight Listen Now: [...]

[Read more →]

This is the second in the four-part series on Ajax functionality and usability patterns (Book: Part 4, pp 327-530). The guest for this week is Dave Johnson of Nitobi (the Ajax component developers formerly known as E-Business Applications), widget guru and author of the upcoming Enterprise Ajax book. Dave helps me walk through the patterns and [...]

[Read more →]

And so, a new series begins, based on the Ajax functionality and usability patterns (Book: Part 4, pp 327-530). We've already looked at the technical details, now we're looking at what Ajax can do for users and how to implement these features. I'm asking guests to join me for most of the remaining Ajax Pattern podcasts. [...]

[Read more →]