Opera is the major player for web widgets and Opera 9
has support for mobile widgets. Openwave also has a Mobile AJAX SDK that allows
building widgets. Apart from these, there are players who have built their own
platforms. WidSets (www.widsets.com) and Plusmo (www.plusmo.com) are popular
among such platforms. There are thousands of widgets available even today! The
following screenshot shows a list of featured widgets on WidSets from the 3000+ that
are available.
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Chapter 11
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Most platforms come with a good amount of documentation to get you started in
developing your own widgets. Opera has a collection of articles at http://dev.
opera.com/articles/widgets/ explaining widgets and how to develop them.
The Advantages of Mobile Widgets
The advantages widgets have are many-fold. First, they run just like other
applications on the device, not as something that needs a browser to launch. It's
much easier for the user to understand and interact with widgets. A widget can
access device resources that a web application cannot. A widget may even cache
some data, reducing the need for AJAX calls to retrieve data. Widgets can have
fancy user interfaces and cool animations.
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