netvibes - (re)mix the web

UWA provides a fair number of built-in Ajax methods:

UWA.Data.getXmlwhen you want to get XML data (including well-formed XHTML), and be able to parse it using XML’s DOM properties and methods (parentNode, childNodes, attributes, getElementsByTagName, etc.),
UWA.Data.getTextwhen you just want to get the data in plain text, and maybe parse it using a regexp,
UWA.Data.getJsonwhen you want to safely […]

With the arrival of Netvibes Ginger, users can now have two sides for their Netvibes account: one private (the classic page), where users put their favorite and most useful widgets like e-mails, feeds, social networks, all to be seen by them only ; and one public (the Netvibes Universe), where the users will tend to […]

We’ve seen how to switch to UWA pretty all available MiniAPI functionalities in this series’ previous articles. Now is the time to touch on functionalities that cannot be switch as-is, or simply put, that are not available in the stricter, more portable Universal Widget API.
One of the toughest of these is preferences. Sure, we’ve […]

Ginger is now open to everyone, and you can all see the new functionalities.
Among these is the integrated search: you don’t need to go to Ecosystem to find new cool stuffs to add to your personal page or your Universe, you can simply search Ecosystem and directly receive the corresponding list of feeds and UWA […]

One question keeps coming up from people who have taken the dive and converted their module to a widget. It’s pretty simple, and represents an essential part of such conversion. This post will therefore be suitably short.
I’m done converting. It works. What’s next?
The “what’s next?” part implies a lot of questions, but mostly they are […]

The gates are opening up, and a few thousand of people now have access to the beta version of Ginger, thanks to invite codes given out by many online publications and blogs (to name a few: Techcrunch, Wired, Facebook, GigaOm and others…).
If you are not one of the lucky guys, fret not: you are […]

The main idea behind this series of articles is, as you’d have guessed by now, to take over the MiniAPI tutorial and push it into the 21st century, kicking and screaming show how easy it can be to get the same effects in UWA. The most acute readers among you would have noticed that we […]

Here comes the high point of this series of articles, where all the bricks come together. During the first three parts, I’ve been banging one specific drum: whereas MiniAPI modules could be based on a multitude of inter-linked dynamic files, UWA widgets should really stick to one static file, and rely on Ajax requests to […]

We’ve seen a lot already: now you should be familiar with the differences between a MiniAPI file and a UWA one, and you should know how to convert a MiniAPI configuration form into a UWA preferences form. Now is the time to dive into a more advanced feature, one that will be of use to […]

It takes more than just updating the emulation files’ URLs to turn a MiniAPI module into a fully working UWA widget. In the first part of this series of articles, we saw that many others section of the HTML code itself need to be upgraded, and the documentation already indicates which MiniAPI function calls have […]