Software As She’s Developed

usual live blogging caveats – spelling errors, messy, etc etc @premasagar is visiting the Osmoplex today (thanks @jayfresh for arranging it) and is taking us through his work on iframes, widgets, and sandboxing. I’ve realised we could perhaps be collaborating as my jquery-iframe plugin is so close to his. Different emphases, but much overlap. GitHub is where [...]

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It’s been said that the world hasn’t been this excited about a tablet since Moses came down the mountain. January 27, 2010, is the day Apple is slated to finally put us out of our misery and tell us what it’s all about. But imagine Steve Job moseys onto the stage, launches a forceful history [...]

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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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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 [...]

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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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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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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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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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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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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: [...]

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