Hi, I'm trying to add basic widget-container functionality to my webapp, so that users will be able to add Google Gadgets to it.
One method I checked was adding the widgets in the same way they are embedded in external sites (via a script tag to igoogle's ifr, the way it's done via the gadgets open directory: http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open ). Problem is a lot of the gadget functionality doesn't work, most notably canvas view and user-customizable user-prefs. Many gadgets seem to depend on this. I've started playing with Shindig, in the hope that I could use gadgets.js and perhaps a little bit of server-side code to implement a really basic gadget container that would support rendering widgets, displaying canvas view and persisting user prefs. But I've run into problems. It seems like Shindig doesn't have canvas-view support out-of-the-box, and from looking at the code of some of the popular gadgets on iGoogle, it looks like they have a lot of iGoogle-specific code, with quite a few _IG_* calls, especially in the Flash gadgets. I'd be happy for some input as to whether you think this second approach is worthwhile and how much coding effort it will require. Also, are the gadgets on iGoogle really conforming to the gadget spec and inoperable in other Gadget containers? Thanks!
