To expand on the answers you have already recieved:
1) iGoogle gadgets are indeed mostly legacy code or use features that are
iGoogle only ('finance', 'weather', etc)
2) You could try to use gadgets from other social network sites (listed at
the link Kevin mentioned), however you'll find that a large number of them
have been written for those specific platforms too, or only accept signed
requests from those platforms
That's not to say there's not some iGoogle gadgets work alright on
OpenSocial, and not all social network site's social apps are non-portable,
but on a whole you'll get a really poor hit rate; Hopefully having a
centralized gadget directory (in the works but no eta available), and/or
products like Google Friend Connect, OpenPNE, and various others will help
to motivate people to write truly portable gadgets.
However at the moment the main advice people to either contact the gadget
authors to get'm to make a version for you too (look at the author contact
tag in the gadget xml files), or tell people you have a great platform that
they could write apps for using OpenSocial.
As far as the rendering difference goes between php and java, there's none,
the above is true regardless of the platform used and the rendering is
identical.
ps, glad you liked Partuza :)
-- Chris
On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 8:05 PM, Arne Roomann-Kurrik <[email protected]>wrote:
> Hi Joe,
>
> iGoogle is probably not a good place to look because most gadgets there
> use what has been branded the "legacy" API which is certainly not
> compatible
> with the current gadget spec. The page Kevin linked to lists most of the
> current OpenSocial containers, which should each have directories from
> which
> you can pull apps for samples. Personally, I've found the PHP version of
> Shindig to do an excellent job of rendering OpenSocial gadgets, but if
> there's a specific rendering bug you're seeing, please file an issue or at
> least provide specific details about the error so that someone on this list
> will be able to offer better help.
>
> Regards,
> ~Arne
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 10:28 AM, Joe Pletcher <[email protected]
> >wrote:
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > Recently I've been working on patching and fixing up Drupal's Shindig
> > Integrator module, a module to turn Drupal into a gadget container (among
> > other things). Having now gotten basic functionality working (rendering,
> > save prefs, etc), I've been trying a variety of gadgets inside the
> > container, and have been disappointed with the rendering results. It
> seems
> > like the majority of gadgets I'm finding are written for iGoogle, and
> won't
> > work elsewhere. A few questions:
> >
> > Right now I'm primarily using iGoogle as a source of gadgets: this is
> > likely why all the applications have rendering issues. Where else can I
> find
> > gadgets? LabPixies seems to have the best track record so far, but I'm
> > having issues with some of their gadgets as well.
> >
> > Thus far I have only set up the php version, might the java version do a
> > better job of rendering?
> >
> > Reading the list I see there is lots of work to be done still, might some
> > of these changes reflect in rendering improvements?
> >
> > These issues aside, I wanted to thank everyone for the work thats being
> > done, especially Chris Chabot and anyone else involved in Partuza, it
> made
> > the implementation of the module much, much easier.
> >
> > Thanks again,
> > Joe
> >
>
>
>
> --
> OpenSocial IRC - irc://irc.freenode.net/opensocial
>
