In my recent post on Windows Live Gadgets I shot down Google because they hadn’t already created their own widget/gadget engine for creating hosted…well…widgets. It seems they were waiting because they could do it better. Today I found out through Slashdot that Google released their version.
Their widget API is available here. At first glance it seems that the Google widgets are a bit more robust and versatile than the Microsoft gadgets. I’ll be playing with these shortly to see what I can come up with and do a thorough compare/contrast. These are the differences I see (at first glance, mind you) between the two companies’ implementations of the same idea:
- Google Widgets are aimed at a completely web-centric approach. They do not offer local Widgets like Microsoft Gadgets does. This is actually a win in my book.
- Microsoft is using RSS syntax for their XML with some external javascript loaded along with it. (I’ll get more technical when I learn a bit more about the process). Google, on the other hand is using what appears to be their own proprietary markup with the inclusion of external javascript as well.
- Microsoft’s implementation prevents the use of the id tag which makes doing some sweet dynamic stuff…well…painful. Google allows it, and goes a step further. They include a sweet little feature called __MODULE_ID__ that you can tack on to the end of your id tags so things will work fine with multiple instances of your widget on the same page. Another win for Google.
Like I said with the Windows Live and MSN Start post, I’ll be doing some heavy research into these widgets and gadgets and bring forth more details and some example code.