Maintainable Web Widgets

Question

How do you create maintainable web widgets?

Right now, I allow my web users to create web widgets via a simple interface, and all the javascript, css, and html needed for that widget gets saved in a database table cell, which is very unmaintainable.

Is there are better way of allowing people to create widgets, yet make them maintainable by the website admin?

Answer 1

There is an official W3C draft for Web Widgets at

• http://www.w3.org/TR/widgets/

This specification standardizes a packaging format for software known as widgets. Widgets are client-side applications that are authored using Web standards, but whose content can also be embedded into Web documents. The specification relies on PKWare's Zip specification as the archive format, XML as a configuration document format, and a series of steps that runtimes follow when processing and verifying various aspects of a package.

You might also be interested in other vendor's widget implementations as given at

• http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widget

The widgets on Google's iGoogle are called Gadgets. There are API docs available for them:

• http://code.google.com/intl/en-US/apis/gadgets/ and
• http://code.google.com/intl/en-US/apis/igoogle/

Answer 2

W3C Widgets is also used for Web Widgets - see Apache Wookie for an example.