netvibes - (re)mix the web

It’s been a few days since our cool Developers Meetup in Paris, where we announced a bunch of new releases that are of importance mostly to you, dear developers!

A proper blogpost has already been published, summing up these releases, and most importantly the new netvibes.org website. You’ll find a lot of information over there, but keep on reading, ‘cos we have more

First, here’s the video I shot from the event, where our Chief Architect, and Head Mastermind behind UWA and netvibes.org’s projects, explains a lot about what he knows best. Watch the whole video to get a feeling of what Netvibes is offering today. It’s all in spoken French, but I took the time to put English subtitles everywhere so that everyone could understand it all.

Netvibes Platform

So there you go:

• netvibes.org is the central repository for all our open-source projects
• currently available projects are:
  • UWA JavaScript Runtime: JavaScript libraries that make it possible to run UWA widgets
  • PHP Exposition libraries: make it possible to parse and compile UWA widgets
  • Exposition widget server: makes it possible to serve widgets to users, notably within an iframe.

All these projects are available under the LGPLv3 license, which is very permissive, and are referred to as the Netvibes Platform. They are still in “technology preview” - a final version should be released in the coming months.

Along with zip-archives of the 3 projects, netvibes.org also features:

• full documentation of UWA JS Runtime (extracted from the code)
• full documentation of Exposition libraries (extracted from the code)
• the mandatory Trac, where you will be able to follow our progress, submit bug-reports, suggestion enhancements, and where some documentation will also find its place (i.e., how to run the Exposition Server).

An official Netvibes Platform forum exists for you to ask question and get support from the team and users.

What does this mean to you? Simply, it makes UWA more “universal” than ever! We read comments saying that UWA widgets working on the 8 major widget platforms (Netvibes, iGoogle, OS X Dashboard, Vista, Live.com, iPhone, Opera, blogwidget…) sure is great, but that apparently doesn’t make it universal enough…
Well, all these open-source components should help any implementer to port UWA to just about any platform, as long as it supports the usual Web standards: HTML, JavaScript and CSS. Everything is there: the Exposition widget server in order not to rely on Netvibes’ backend, the Exposition libraries in order to compile the widget to just about any of the currently supported platforms, and the UWA JS libraries so that all the client-side JS code of UWA widget works as expected.

All these components are the exact same as the ones we use. That doesn’t mean that Netvibes.com-the-startpage will be available as open-source, ready-to-install code, but it does mean that you can now handle UWA widgets your way, on your own system.

Now go download those archives, try them out, have fun with them, and let us know how we can, together, make them better!

But wait! There’s more!

There are still a few more cool things that might have gone under the radar, one of which being the official release of the UWA-Iframe method, which lets you display UWA widgets within your own environment (website, blog…), through a simple iframe. 

The UWA-Iframe method is the successor to the BlogWidget method, which lets you display UWA widget just about anywhere on the Web, using a simple iframe call to our servers. This new method is far better, and gives you full control over the way events are handled within your system.

This method has already been used in beta form by countless of projects, big or small, open-source or closed source, and it was already working quite well. Now that we have a far superior version, we are releasing it officially for all those who would like to implement widgets simply, in their system: Web portal, blogging tools, etc. For instance, the UWA implementation within JBoss Portal 2.6.3 is based on a previous version of this method.

There are a few other things cooking up, but I’ll talk about them here once a feel confident about their coherence and usefulness. For now, I’m sure you can already find plenty of code to have fun with using the above releases.

Let us know about how you would see them evolve!

Tags: exposition, iframe, lgpl, libraries, netvibes.org, open-source, php, platform, runtime, uwa, video, widget

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 5:20 pm and is filed under Articles, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.