A World of Widgets - A Closer Look at Widgets
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Widgets are made from a combination of XML and JavaScript (with images and other resources as well). It reminds me in some ways of XUL, another XML derivative concerned with application development, but my initial impression of it was that it was easier to work with and there's a lot more automation, like with the rendering of the preferences window for example. On the face of things, not a lot has changed with widgets since the Yahoo! acquisition; widgets on the whole look the same, the system tray icon looks the same, you even get pretty much the same default widgets following an install.
The only visible difference is that the name Konfabulator, which appears frequently in versions prior to 3, has been changed to Yahoo! Widget Engine. Behind the scenes, things are a little different; the file size of the installed application has more than doubled since the acquisition. That doesn't mean much in terms of space used or anything, but it does show that quite a bit must have changed somewhere. The version history page on Yahoo's site lists the huge number of fixes and additions to the engine since (and including) the release of version 3.0.
Yahoo! is on to a winner with the re-branded Konfabulator. People love to get involved in things like this, and it has a real open-source community feel to it. Yahoo wants to get people into using and making widgets and boast that it is very simple to create them, so just how easy is it to actually create a widget?
I thought that as part of this article, I would design and create a widget from scratch to find out whether it really is as easy as they make it out to be. Initially, I read through the Widgets manual and followed the instructions in the widget development article included in the SDK version of the Widget engine download. On the whole, it was well written and pretty easy to follow. Within about 10 minutes I had a working widget sitting on my desktop. It looked nothing like the ultra-slick widgets that came bundled with the download, but it worked nonetheless and was made using nothing but a simple text editor.
Next: Read the Widget Manual >>
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