Since widgets have been the talk of the town for months if not years (which translates to decades and centuries web time) I guess it’s only fair I get my overdue commentary out of the way. I’m going to bring my side dish to the buffet even if everyone is already stuffed to the gills.

If you don’t know what a widget is, check the supreme wiki. It is most definitely not those random things you were adding up in Business Finance 1113.

There are many widget platforms out there to choose from. Most web users have probably heard of Yahoo! Widgets and Netvibes. While both of these platforms have their merits I think SpringWidgets is the most compelling offering to date. Yahoo! seems to rule the desktop realm and NetVibes is entrenched as one of the web leaders, but neither of the aforementioned work well as a web and desktop framework. SpringWidgets’ SpringBox platform attempts to bridge the gap between the two by leveraging Flash, a technology already installed on most computers. SpringWidgets allows developers to create Flash-based widgets that can operate within the SpringBox desktop environment or as an object embedded in a web page. The downside of SW is they currently don’t offer the desktop environment for OSX or Linux. Another drawback is no web environment is currently available for aggregating widgets. In any event, I don’t see any framework winning out altogether in the widget space, but the ones that support programs that can leap the gap from web to OS are going to have a leg up.

It would be interesting to see if OpenLaszlo could be utilized for the purpose of generating JavaScript-based widgets for the web and Flash widgets for the desktop. Using this approach one might be able to render the widgets in ways that suit the respective environments.