Mark’s Blog

I have been building a proposal for a client, and to get more familiar with the iGoogle Gadget API, I built a Gadget that pulls a list of URLs from a remote XML file asynchronously and displays them.

Fun lessons I learned about writing iGoogle Gadgets:

• Using the iGoogle editor allows you to quickly edit, preview and troubleshoot apps, BUT does not allow you to use anything but the legacy APIs
• You cannot develop with the new APIs by calling them from your server, as they are cached by Google every hour (along with any called XML files)
• iGoogle has a pretty intuitive setup for using Javascript and writing cross-browser apps, once you look past the (very) rough developer’s tools

Here’s the gadget as it exists currently:

My future plans are to put the links in a tab, and change the link loading scheme.  The images are just too big and take precious vertical space. I’ll use another tab to display an RSS feed.  iGoogle has an API to chew on feeds and convert them to JSON for you.

I think loading the App data from an external XML/JSON is a far superior solution to hard-coding it into an app.  It allows it to be edited much easier by an program/unskilled user. You can view the code by reading the XML file here.