introduction to w3c widgets and how to win a competition in a few lines of javascript

Christian Heilmann – Barcamp Brighton, England – September 2009

or how to win a

competition in 28

lines of code.

W3C widgets for mobile

Mobile technology is sexy!

Developing for mobiles is a bitch though.

We love web standards.

What keeps us from using them though is outdated technology.

So, to use the knowledge we have and to embrace the cool new mobile world, there is a solution!

http://www.w3.org/TR/widgets/

...or for humans...

http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2009/04/introduction_to.html

Widgets, like Air, Flash, Jetpack or other defined environments are great.

The reason is that the standards work.

And in the widget case, there is another big perk.

Another benefit is that you have more rights to do cool stuff in JavaScript.

OK, so what about the winning thing?

I was in Cologne, Germany for Vodafone’s Summer of Widgets.

One of the hacks scraped the web and showed a translation.

http://isithackday.com/hacks/summerofwidgets/translation.html

Which inspired me to do this one:

...and submit it.

I won the competition last week (Netbook + Mobile)

How did I do it?

Rockstar?

Lazy!

http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlanguage/documentation/

http://github.com/codepo8/MultiTweet/tree/master

http://github.com/codepo8/MultiTweet/tree/masterhttp://www.betavine.net/bvportal/resources/widgets/research

We need you now!

W3C widgets do not give you access to the cool mobile stuff yet.

Location, camera, contacts, accelerometer...

The more web folk do some cool widgets, the faster this will happen.

Got you excited? Go for it!

Christian Heilmann

http://wait-till-i.com

http://developer-evangelism.com

http://twitter.com/codepo8

C h e e r s !