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Icon to indicate a widget. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This post will be a quick & dirty step-by-step guide to building a Widget following the cross-platform W3C Widget specification. For starters I’ll list out the 7 primary W3C specifications on Widgets and 4 specs on their use with Mobile devices (roughly in order of significance):

• Packaged Web Apps (Widgets) – Packaging & XML Configuration
• Widget Interface – for exposing Widget capabilities via API
• Widget Access Request Policy – WARP, request access to external resources
• XML Digital Signatures for Widgets – DigSig, security and reliability of code
• Widget Updates – remote changes & availability management
• Requirement For Standardizing Widgets – standard
• Widgets URI scheme – to tell stacks how to launch
• Device API requirements – enable the creation of Widgets that interact with device capabilities (Calendar, Contacts, Camera, etc)
• Device API requirements – for controlling access to device APIs
• Device API Privacy requirements – for making device APIs more privacy-friendly
• The ‘view-mode’ Media Feature – for redirecting to different renderings

Now unless you are supporting an instance of one of the legacy widget platforms/portals for your organization, or, have recently been put in charge of building a new “widget type platform” for your company, then I wouldn’t suggest you waste too much time going through all those specs. I’m intending to give you a quick overview here that will save you that pain and give you a sufficient familiarity to be functional with Widgets right away.

What is a Widget?

Whether you call it a widget, gadget, badge, module, capsule, snippet, framed window, representation, implementation, micro, mini, page flake or anything else; a Widget is a small web, mobile, or desktop application that brings information directly to you, so you don’t have to go somewhere else look for the information yourself.

Some widgets are helpful self-contained resources like clocks, calculators, or calendars. Some widgets are static and just display specific information that rarely if ever changes, like a “list of useful links” or some reminder text. Some widgets are more dynamic and let you write desktop post-it notes, convert media files, or see weather forecasts. Dynamic/Interactive widgets really do let you accomplish some incredible stuff, like let you automatically feed Dilbert comics in color straight to your Facebook wall or Instagram followers (or even just to your blog, personal web page, or even your desktop). Widgets can of course also pull data from external sources. Regardless of their type, all widgets are designed to be shared. You can easily send your favorite widgets to friends and co-workers with a single click and email, and anyone who sees a widget on your personal pages can download a version to customize for themselves. The following image from the original Widget 1.0 spec shows how this simplicity works behind the scenes, based on web standards:
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