Recently I heard about W3C Widgets, a term I had not heard about before. As you may know, widgets are small-size applications, usually built using web technologies, that can run on our computer desktop, web browser, websites and of course mobile devices or TVs. These applications generally perform small tasks like displaying news, weather or a clock; but nothing prevents them from being more sophisticated. Some time back I had played around with the widget format of the Opera browser. Those widgets are basically just HTML, CSS and Javascript packed in a .zip file (renamed to .wgt) along with a configuration file, which is great if you already know how to develop with these technologies! If you’re interested, have a look at the specification. In the newest release, Opera widgets can run independent from the browser like a native Windows application! They also have a widget engine for mobile phones.
I’ve seen similar things (like Google Gadgets), so I thought there will be many proprietary, non-interoperable widget formats from different vendors. And now the W3C is trying to add one more on top?! I was skeptical at first, but after reading this article I felt excited. It seems the W3C specification is driven by Opera and Vodafone who want to extend and standardize what Opera is already doing. Let’s see who will adopt this format; maybe we’ll have a great open platform for lightweight applications soon.
No software project could exist today without version control. Version control makes it easy to track changes in the code and to collaborate. Previously, I had always used SVN (Subversion) for that purpose. Now increasingly I hear about git and, related to that, github, a place for so-called Social Coding. Being curious about git and the buzz around github, I decided to try it out. I have just done the basics and so far I feel the major difference between git and svn is the decentralized approach and that I first commit changes to my own copy and then only push it to the central server. And it doesn’t come with revision numbers, a feature I think I might be missing, but that only experience can tell.
To test out github, I have created my github profile and uploaded a very tiny project called WADL2DB. It’s an XSLT stylesheet used to generate documentation in DocBook format based on a web application description in WADL. I like using DocBook as a documentation tool and I use WADL to describe REST-ful APIs, so I was writing the stylesheet to help me generate documentation and save double workload. Future plans are to enhance this with XSD-based API descriptions. So if this could be helpful for you, go and check it out!
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