Find your way home with UWA widgets
These days, thanks to the constant improvement of mapping services, it’s easier than ever to find your way home (or to that faraway party). UWA widgets help you a bit further. See, with mapping web services blossoming and opening up with APIs, our Ecosystem has seen its share of useful widgets making use of these.
One such example is a project which aims at being useful to people worldwide, even it’s developers are French: the excellent i-Métro widget, which was recently submitted to Ecosystem. Created by Patrice Bernard and Frank van Caenegem, it lets you pick among a host of cities with public transportation systems on any continent, and once that’s done, find the best route between two spots.
The widget touches a few sweet-spots: clever (many various web services packed into one), multilingual (10 languages), potentially useful to anyone in the world (more than 250 cities in its database)… The i-Métro UWA widget is part of the extension tools offered by Patrice and Franck’s website, i-Métro.
Many things can be learnt from looking at this widget’s code. For starters, it makes use of some complex display while entirely relying on JavaScript/DOM methods to build it, and using a handful of Ajax requests for sending and fetching data. This makes for some hefty code (1634 lines…), but it gets two major benefits: not only does this self-containedness relieve the server from some heavy code-lifting, but it also makes for a more portable widget.
Indeed, what’s more useful when using a best-route widget: checking it from home before leaving to that party, or being able to check it all along the way, both as a reminder or in dire need of update? Obviously, the second case is best, and that’s exactly what the portability of UWA allows: i-Métro will work on many platforms, and among those is the iPhone/iPod Touch version. What best to prove the daily usefulness of widgets than to have them available at hand?
Recently, our French users saw a flurry of Vélib’-related services, thanks to the incredible openness of this system ; and accordingly, within a few days of the launch of the official Vélib’ website, a handful of widgets were gracing the pages of Ecosystem – and let’s not forget the Vélo’v ones. Some were really advanced, with ties to a third-party web service and use of Google Maps, while others where built for a single purpose – but those widgets proved invaluable for Vélib’ users, hence our post on our French blog at the time.
Oh, and train users are not left alone, since they also have access to UWA widgets for Canada’s VIA Rail (in both English and French), and for France’s Voyages-SNCF service. Who said UWA developers where not aware of users needs? 
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