On 15 Mar 2011, at 21:46, Ross Gardler wrote: > As you can see I've recently built a few templates demonstrating different > ways of building widgets. I see templates as both a means to document how to > build certain behaviour into widgets and a means to provide a quick start way > of building widgets. > > However, these two objectives are not complimentary. The more detailed a > template becomes the less likely it is to be reused as it will have features > that are not needed and not have features that are needed. In addition, the > more detailed it becomes the less useful it is as a form of documentation. > > So I'd like to share my ideas for a template strategy. > > What I propose to do is build a number of templates where each one > demonstrates a single key feature of W3C Widgets or Open Social Gadgets. Note > I say a *single* feature, I really mean it. If we focus on demonstrating a > single feature very well then each template becomes useful as a documentation > for the feature being demonstrated.
I think thats a good idea. If you look at the templates for Dashcode (Apple's dashboard widgets editor) they are also single-feature: - countdown - maps - rss - podcast - photocast - video podcast - guage - daily feed > > Our initial focus would therefore be on provided complete and well commented > demonstrations of each major feature of widgets and gadgets. These will be > designed with the intention of reuse in users own widgets. > > I'm thinking that our templates would include things like: > > - basic single page widget > - basic single page gadget > - properties handling > - Wave feature > - JQueryMobile > - Friends list > - Activity streams > - etc. > > If our commenting in these templates is reasonably complete we can use these > templates as part of our documentation in the live website and in bundled > docs. > > At some point in the future I would like us to enhance the template > generation scripts to enable us to join together a number of the single > feature templates into a single coherent widget/gadget template. That is, > when running the seed-template target we choose the features we want to > include and a custom template is built for us. This will require some form of > intelligent way of plugging them together in the interface, but we can deal > with that at a later date. > > Does this sound like a sensible strategy. That is attack each of these tasks > in order: > > - build templates as documentation for features of widgets and gadgets > - integrate these templates into our website > - provide a clever "jumpstart" system for widgets/gadgets +1 > > Ross
