This article was published on June 6, 2008

Netvibes starts website dedicated to open source projects


Netvibes starts website dedicated to open source projects

Netvibes’ chief architect François Hodierne announced the opening of netvibes.org, a website dedicated to Netvibes’ Open Source projects: “By giving away our technology, we hope to foster innovations in the widget and personal-page space, and launch a discussion about their wide implementation.” Netvibes widgets are based on UWA, the Netvibes Universal Widget API. ‘Universal’ since UWA-based widgets run on any platform that supports common Web standards (HTML/JavaScript/CSS). That means iGoogle too.

Netvibes.org is basically a sneak-preview of what’s really coming as the Netvibes developers need some more feedback before the project officially launches. Developers who want to give UWA a try, can work on three projects now:

  • The UWA JavaScript Runtime: JavaScript libraries that make it possible to run UWA widgets
  • The PHP Exposition libraries: make it possible to parse and compile UWA widgets
  • The Exposition widget server: makes it possible to serve widgets to users, notably within an iframe.

I love the paradox of open source. Netvibes says it “gives away” their technology, yet they will probably never turn the personalized homepage into a open source project. Thus what Netvibes (and most other web companies do), is giving away little pieces of the technology – almost everything but the core technology -, so more service-related widgets will flood the web. That gives them a) a better image and b) more functionality.

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