Making your first widget for Opera 9

April 23, 2007 at 10:46 pm | In General |

Barcamp Bangalore also had a session on widgets and their emergence
in the current internet scene. Opera is one of the pioneers in this
field with their support towards the current widget standards and also
its widget platform. What is a widget you ask?

A widget is a
small Web application, and making a widget is just like making a web
page, except it functions like an application and lives directly on
your desktop.

Step 1. Create a file named config.xml to give the widget a name and some dimensions.

<widget>
<widgetname> Hello World </widgetname>
<width>300</width>
<height>100</height>
</widget>

Step 2. create a file named index.html
<html>
<body><h1>Hello World </h1></body>
</html>

Step 3. create a zip file containing the newly
created config.xml and index.html at the root folder. You can open this
zip file inside Opera 9 to test your widget.

step 4. Upload your widget on widgets.opera.com and you are done!

Though this demo is stricly restricted to Opera, as the widget 1.0 standards is put into place, more browsers must be able to support this sort of a mechanism.
This is how your widget would look if styled properly. You can also visit http://my.opera.com/community/dev/widgets/ for more details