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Distributed and Self-organizing Systems
Distributed and Self-organizing Systems

W3C Widget Converter

Introduction

Currently the number of publicly available W3C Widgets is relative small compared to the large amount of iGoogle, Opera and Netvibes widgets. The goal of the W3C converter tool is to enable automatic conversion of proprietary widgets into W3C format. The tools currently supports Opera, iGoogle and Netvibes formats

Usage

The tool supports two modes: single conversion and batch conversion.

WidgetConverter

The single conversion lets user select a single widget file (e.g. Opera, iGoogle, UWA ) and parameterize the conversion process using a wizard dialog. The batch mode processes a bunch of input files based on a parameters defined in a dedicated configuration file. A log file is kept in the output directory

Single mode

Following parameters can be set in the single mode:

Working Directory Points to an output folder, which will contain the converted widgets. Each widget is placed into separate subfolder
Working Directory Name Length Limits the length of the resulting output subfolder (for compliance to the path length restriction of Windows)
Apache Wookie Adaptation Ensures that the resulting W3C widgets run in the Apache Wookie container. This implies the injection of the "widget.proxify" function, which enables cross-origin requests for widgets running in Wookie
Remove the iGoogle Analytics Feature Removes “analytics” and “com.google.gadgets.analytics” iGoogle features

Batch mode

Following parameters can be set in the configuration file for the batch mode:

widgetinput File path Path to the source folder with widget packages
searchoption “TopDirectoryOnly” or “AllDirectories” Specifies if also subdirectories of the input folder should be processed
widgetoutput File path Path to the output folder for the converted W3C widgets
widgetoutputoverwrite “true” or “false” “true” to overwrite files in the output folder with the same name as input widget
widgetworkdelete “true” or “false” “true” to delete the working directory with internals of converted widgets. Only *.wgt package will be left.
widgetwidth Positive Integer Default widget width
widgetheight Positive Integer Default widget height

Evaluation

To evaluate the tool we took 25 commonly used or best rated widgets from iGoogle, Opera and Netvibes platform. The functionality of the converted widgets has been verified manually after deploying them into an instance of Apache Wookie 0.9.2.

Opera widgets

For the Opera format we tested 35 widgets (10 of them didn’t run in the Opera widget environment). The application converted 21 of the 25 given Opera widgets into the W3C format. Two of them couldn’t be converted due to JavaScript API calls, which aren’t supported at the moment of the tool . Of the 21 successfully converted widgets only 13 worked with Apache Wookie (52%).

iGoogle

The tool converted all of the 25 selected iGoogle gadgets successfully. However, only 23 of the 25 generated widgets worked with Apache Wookie (92%)

Netvibes

To convert Netvibes widgets into W3C format we first exported them as Opera widgets. The application converted all 25 widgets successfully. From the converted widgets 22 worked in Apache Wookie. (88%)

Download

Requirements: .NET Framework 4

W3C Converter (ZIP-Archive with Executable)

For more information please have a look into Michael Hertel's Bachelor Thesis (only German)

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