Netvibes Developers blog

This is year is coming to an end, parties are being planned already, and it might be time to look back at what 2008 brought us – and by us, I mean UWA and its ecosystem.

2008 has been a good year: we’ve released some very cool stuffs, added some functionalities to the API, and made the code sturdier. Let’s bring on The List:

• Netvibes saw a major release, named Ginger, which quite simply overhauled everything, from code to design. UWA also benefited from this with some niceties (such as rich-icon, widget.readOnly and widget.addStar) and consequently the MiniAPI finally got put to rest.
• Our dear DevNet site got a cool new design, and the UWA Cheat-Sheet got finalized in a lovely printable form, as a companion to the one-page documentation.
• In May, we celebrated the first birthday of UWA late, with a Developer Conference where we released…
  netvibes.org: the central repository for all our open-source projects, with a proper bug-tracking tool ;
  Netvibes Platform: open-sourced UWA components, such as UWA JavaScript Runtime (to run UWA widgets), PHP Exposition libraries (to parse and compile UWA widgets) and Exposition widget server (to serve widgets to users) ;
  Full in-code documentation for all the above projects ;
  The UWA-iframe method.
• To polish our opening of UWA, we published the first working draft of the UWA specification, for everyone to implement our widget API freely ;
• Since september, designer can create their own theme for Netvibes, through an XML format ;
• Ecosystem saw the addition of a full-blown widget creator, which eases the creation of widgets based on multiple feeds ;
• And finally, as if all this wasn’t enough, we released a preview of our support for the OpenSocial API, allowing widget developers to not only have universal widget, but social too (provide the platform support OpenSocial).

All in all, this has been a very productive year, and we hope you’ve been happy with the direction we gave to UWA. Be sure that more evolution is being prepared for 2009!

Have some excellent NYE parties, everyone, and as the saying goes, “see you next year!”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Articles. 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.