[kenna]

Hi All,

I am a relatively decent programmer, I have experience of use with Java, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, SQL etc at basic to intermediate level.

I wish to develop a Widget that I can share with Apple users for the Football Fixtures for next seasons Football/Soccer season.

I will be receiving my first Mac this week. I have looked into developing widgets and it seems you can get all that you need off the OS X Leopard disk.

It seems really easy (from research) to develop the interface for the Widget.

But in terms of functionality, I would like the widget to change its fixture display each week. And to display 10-20 fixtures for that week.

Questions:

Is this simply too big an app to create as a widget?
How would I program the widget to change its contents every week?
Where could I store the data that the widget would display?
And where can I start to look to help this idea flourish with the best possible layout, functionality etc?

Thanks to anyone who can help. I've never created a widget before and it looks like a great way to ease your everyday tasks into one simple screen. I think a lot of people would love this app. So really intrigued as to how to develop it.

[Chuckit]

A widget is basically an AJAX-powered Web page. If you can figure out how you'd write this as a Web page, writing the widget shouldn't be much trickier.

[kenna]

Thanks Chuckit i've used AJAX before using Prototype.

In other words, I would have to use a database and pull results via Ajax Requests which would run once every 7 days?

I can't quite get my head round the ability to pass on a database to other end users, like sure I could build a database that runs remotely on my system and I could get my widget to look up that database which would be complete with all the fixtures, but I don't understand sharing that world wide

Do you know of any materials that could help me to further understand widgets?

Thanks for your feedback, much appreciated.

[Chuckit]

You would set up a server that has the information (or find some other place that has it and will let you access it) and the widget will download the information from there and display it.

More info: Developing Dashboard Widgets