Opera's new software kit beckons to widget developers

Wednesday's beta release of a software development kit for Opera widgets brings the Norwegian company one step closer to its lofty goal of world browser domination.

This Opera widget could appear on your laptop, desktop, or Wii.

(Credit: Opera Software)

Opera Software if offering the SDK for widget authors to deploy their Web applications on the spectrum of devices that support the Opera browser.

The Opera widget SDK was designed on W3C standards to support CSS, JavaScript, Ajax, and HTML languages. The kit itself contains an emulator, libraries, and documentation full of nuggets on best development practices. Along with the emulator, developers may find the included Opera Dragonfly debugging tool most useful; though in alpha stage, Dragonfly could require some debugging itself.

The development kit builds on individual help articles and style guides circulated through Opera's development community site. It also draws on previous work for a widget wizard, the Widgetizer, which has been used to create simple apps.

In addition to a fine desktop browser, Opera surfs on Windows Mobile and Symbian cell phones with Opera Mobile and on the Nintendo Wii. Developers who take advantage of the SDK can create one widget to work on any of these browser flavors using many more workflow tools than were previously available.

Only Opera Opera Mini 4.1 for Java cell phones is excluded from the crop. As a diet Web browser, it doesn't yet have the capacity to support the widgets.

Opera may not have cornered the desktop browser market, but as the company continues to prove, it sure knows a thing or two about getting its products out there as many ways as it can. If you're a widgets developer, maybe your products, too.

[DarkHawke]

Okay, you can now get widgets with Vista, OS X and from Yahoo. And I need my browser to run widgets for what reason? Okay, Firefox does have widget-like things, e.g. Forecast Fox, Foxytunes, etc., but they're all designed to fit on the Firefox window itself, not just hang around where-ever on the screen. And speaking of that, where are these widgets gonna fit on devices with real small screens, like smartphones? Tell me what I'm missing that makes this a great idea.

[johnnysaucepn]

Do your Vista gadgets work on a Mac? Do your dashboard widgets work on Windows? Do your Yahoo! widgets work on your mobile phone, or your Wii console?

Opera widgets work on all these and more, because the technology is platform-agnostic. The author provides whatever styling changes are required for the different display modes (docked, small screens, floating, etc.) and produces a single package that runs on any Opera 9.5 platform.

I'm the author of the widget pictured, and I've not updated it with a small-screen mode, but you can bet I will. Then you can download and install it on your phone just like you can on your desktop.

[tareqf1]

wow. the only thing Opera is lacking is this from FireFox, plugin.
Now opera is going ahead. Sure it wil be a leader in the Browser market.

[majinkenZERO]

well that 'would' have been true... but mozilla is bringing their firefox to mobile phones by the end of this year. its already available for the nokia N820 i believe. they say it will boast tabbed browsing, among other stuff, and most importantly the adobe flash player 9 plugin. no more flash lite for us.

[DarkHawke]

Well, first off, nice widget design! I like the Yahoo Weather widget better, but yours is very nice itself.

Second, given your response, perhaps it's a matter of perspective (then again, what ain't?). Not being a widget developer (widgeteer?) myself, nor having any other platforms than XP, I couldn't care less how portable the widgets I use are.

I can (kinda) see the advantage of a write-once/run-many situation, but wouldn't it be a better thing to port a lighter-weight bit of middle-ware than a web browser? Yahoo Widgets already works on 'Doze and Macs. Sure, Yahoo would have to get that done and Opera already has, but it just seems ungainly to have to run a web browser to run widgets, when generally widgets are dedicated information representations that are designed to obviate the need to run a web browser and surf to find the same information.

[hossam2000]

yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

[0zSpit]

opera never fully loads on my computer. kind of like the firefox lag except it's constant.

[piyushalpesh]

no