Universal Widget API

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Draft

The Universal Widget API (UWA for short) is the name of the 1.0 release of the Netvibes API, i.e. it is a specification for building web widgets.

Netvibe's UWA widgets run in

* Netvibes
* Also can be loaded into iGoogle, Apple Dashboard (and more to come)

See also: AJAX, the introduction to web widgets and Pageflakes API (an other mashup).

## A simple AJAX example[edit | edit source]

The example can be found at http://tecfa.unige.ch/guides/js/ex/netvibes/ (it's free). It is based on Netvibes hello world example and a glance at UWA specs

It will display a short message that can be changed by editing the preferences of the widget. When you hit ok, the string you entered will be sent to a php program via a XMLHttpRequest and PHP will send back a XML text string.

To see how it works, click on file hello.html. You will be invited to include in a netvibes page (also iGoogle). If you want to play with the code also get the helloapi.phps.

JS CODE

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:widget="http://www.netvibes.com/ns/">
<head>
<meta name="author" content="Daniel K. Schneider" />
<meta name="description" content="Testing the Hello widget" />
<meta name="apiVersion" content="1.0" />
<meta name="inline" content="true" />
<meta name="debugMode" content="false" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
href="http://www.netvibes.com/themes/uwa/style.css" />

<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.netvibes.com/js/UWA/load.js.php?env=Standalone"></script>

<widget:preferences>
<preference name="hellowho" type="text" label="What do you like ?"
defaultValue="World" />
</widget:preferences>
<title>Hello World</title>
<link rel="icon" type="image/png"
href="http://www.netvibes.com/favicon.ico" />

<script type="text/javascript">
var HelloWidget = {
completeHello: false,
parse: function(completeHello) {
if (completeHello) HelloWidget.completeHello = completeHello;
widget.setBody('<p>' + HelloWidget.completeHello + '</p>');

widget.onLoad = function() {
// Call PHP with argument hellowho=...
var url = 'http://tecfa.unige.ch/guides/js/ex/netvibes/helloapi.php?' + 'hellowho' + '=' + widget.getValue('hellowho');
// We expect simple text output from php
UWA.Data.getText(url, HelloWidget.parse);

</script>
</head>
<body>
<p>Loading...</p>
</body>
</html>

PHP code

<?php
error_reporting(E_ALL);
header ("Content-type: application/xml");
echo '<?xml version="1.0" ?>';

if (array_key_exists('hellowho', $_GET))
{ $user_pref  = $_GET['hellowho']; }
else
$user_pref="nothing";

// echo "Query string was: " .  $_SERVER["QUERY_STRING"];
echo "<div><p>I like " . $user_pref . "</p>";
echo "<p>Click Edit to change your preference!</p>";
echo '<p>Soure code: <a href="http://tecfa.unige.ch/guides/js/ex/netvibes/"
target="new">http://tecfa.unige.ch/guides/js/ex/netvibes/</a></p></div>';

## Links[edit | edit source]

* dev.netvibes website