Creating your first iGoogle Gadget Creating your first iGoogle Gadget

Recently at work, we've started diving into Google Gadgets.� They are quite fun and really extremely easy to build.� In this article, I'm going to get you started creating your very own Google Gadget.

Sit back and reserve�a few�minutes of your time and you will be well on your way in no time!


The first thing we need to do is open our favorite text editor.� Create a new file called google.xml.� Inside the file,�place the following information to get started:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<Module>
� <ModulePrefs title="Hello, World!"
��� height="240">
��� <Require feature="opensocial-0.8"/>
��� <Require feature="views" />
��� <Require feature="setprefs" />
� </ModulePrefs>
� <Content type="html" view="home"><![CDATA[�
� ]]>
� </Content>
� <Content type="html" view="profile"><![CDATA[�
� ]]>
� </Content>
� <Content type="html" view="canvas"><![CDATA[�
� ]]>
� </Content>
</Module>

The following code sets up our basic module.� We create a module, give it a title and a fixed height.� We require a couple of options to provide us with a few capabilities.� Finally we create three blank content areas: "home", "profile", and "canvas".

The home content area gets displayed if our module was embeded on another webpage other than iGoogle.

The profile content gets displayed when viewing the module in iGoogle.� This is the small box that can be dragged and dropped to organize the various modules in your account.

The canvas content area gets displayed when the module is maximized.� When maximized, it takes up the full area inside of iGoogle, minus the left navigation.

To actually have content displayed now, we simply need to populate our different content areas.� Inside of the content areas you can include Javascript, CSS, and HTML.� The sky is the limit!� If you plan to create gadgets with dynamic data, Google offers AJAX helpers to load data in through AJAX.

Enjoy!

Published on May 12, 2009

Tags: iGoogle | XML

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