Writing Google Gadgets

I wrote a four part tutorial recently on how to write Google gadgets. This tutorial expands beyond a simple “Hello World” sample, and dives into the key concepts of writing Gadgets. The tutorial uses WSO2 Gadget Server as the hosting engine for the sample gadgets.

When writing a Google gadget, you need to understand the anatomy of a gadget, and have a good idea of what each section of the gadget is meant to be, and how to use each section to maximize the utility of the gadget.

The tutorial explains the use of these sections in detail, and how to make use of each over the span of the sour parts of the tutorial.

Google gadgets can be used as a powerful tool, specially as a visualization and presentation tool in the SOA space. It offers features that can help you build versatile, productive and powerful dashboards for your day to-day monitoring as well as for data analysis for decision support.

The series of tutorials start simple and go on explaining how to build gadgets that can be re-used, and use various views and gadget and user preferences.

Here is the TOC:

Writing Google Gadgets - A tutorial - Part 01

        Google Gadgets Basics

                Anatomy of a Gadget

                Basic Gadget Example - Hello Gadget

                Hello Gadget in Action

        Pulling Information from the Web into a Gadget

                Content Type URL Gadgets

                Content Type HTML Gadgets

                Pulling Information into a Gadget with makeRequest

        Dynamic Height with Google Gadgets

Writing Google Gadgets – A tutorial – Part 02

        Processing Fetched HTML with JavaScript

        Using TEXT vs DOM Content Type when Working with HTML

        Using External JavaScript Libraries

Writing Google Gadgets - A tutorial - Part 03

        Setting User Preferences

                Using enum Data Type as an Options List

                Using Boolean Data Type

                Integer Settings with String Data Type

                Setting Preferences from Within the Gadget

        Dealing with Views

Writing Google Gadgets – A tutorial – Part 04

        Versatility of Google Gadgets as a Presentation Instrument

        The Complete Google Gadget Code

        Tips and Tricks

                Error Handling

                Incremental Development

                When Things go wrong: F12

                Always Test with IE

                Use an IDE

Technorati Tags: Google Gadgets

Internet and Tings – We are NOT Done Yet!

Today, we live on the Internet.

Bin Laden was killed, and the news was broken out on Twitter, before any news channel did.

We search Google or Bing for anything. Even if you want to know right spellings for a word, you just enter something close to Chrome’s address bar, and Google will tell you the right spellings.

People share so many things on Facebook and stay connected.

It seems as if, we cannot live without it, the Internet.

But are we really benefited? Is there any use of this information overflow, overflow.

Lets step back for a moment, and see what is really going on.

Yes we tweet, and tweet and things get re-tweeted many times over. But how many do really sit down, and read all those stories that are being tweeted? We are busy tweeting, but do we really care reading. Many are just scanning the title and the first para, if at all. That is it. The rest hardly get read.

We Facebook, tons of pics, and tons of gossip. So what? Who will ever read again the status updates that were done yesterday? No time, as you got to watch what is on the walls that are scrolling at lightning rate. We keep on filling data bases with all this rubbish, but for what use?

We search for many a things, on a daily basis, and we go through the pile of search results that the search engines return. How do we know if the search engine included the right results at all?  May be the best page that has the right info that I am looking for is not even linked by someone and is somewhere out there. The largest inbound links marks the best pages on Internet – that is a myth – yet you believe cause that is what Google delivers, or Bing delivers. If this theory was right, one would never have to search for anything over and over again, tuning the search terms to find what you are looking for. But when was the last time that you were looking for something and the first search hit was what you were looking for exactly, except for the case that you were looking for a company website?

We do not use printed books any more, because the internet has it. And printed books, they are not green! But the laptop, the ISP, the search engine servers, are they green? The dictionary I bought more than 10 years back is still on my table, but I do not use it. The internet is easier, just type it in, and the results come. How green is that? I am not sure.

The Internet, as we know it, is so fabulous. But if you look at all these fabulous services, they are so dumb and sub-optimal in the way they are built and operate. It is a waste to keep the bulk of the tweets in the twitter database, as no one will ever look at those ever again, but we keep those. We keep all those rubbish state updates like ‘ate’, ‘slept’ and ‘so cute’ in Facebook DB that nobody would ever care about. And the search engine results are increasingly less relevant and less useful, but the bots keep indexing and we keep searching, scanning, clicking and discarding bulk of those results on a daily basis. On one hand, there is massive waste of resources, and on the other hand, we users get very little value out of that waste.

The good news though, is that, there is room for better technology, for better Google – better Bing – better Facebook – better Twitter.

So if you ever thought that Google is the best and can never be beaten, think again … the Internet could offer a much better experience - and two/three fresh undergrads might figure how in the future – hopefully!