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Author's profile photo Abesh Bhattacharjee
Abesh Bhattacharjee
February 22, 2007 1 minute read

HTML on Yahoo! Widgets !!!

Have you ever dreamed of showing rich content on your widget ?   Ever thought how powerful a widget will become once it’s possible to display rich content like Macromedia Flash (swf), Acrobat Reader documents(PDF), Media files (Windows media, Real Media and Quicktime) and more on your widget to create an extremely rich UI.   Recently, while browsing through the Yahoo Widgets Forum, I came across a post which touted a COM component capable of doing all this ! And surely I was impressed.   I went on to visit their website and downloaded the component and went to to write a piece of code to display a Java Applet chart. The result was very interesting !   The following piece of code was used in the onLoad trigger of the widget : var WebBrowser = COM.createObject( “CentralTopic.IEwidget” ); WebBrowser.Init( true ); WebBrowser.ShowInTaskbar = false; WebBrowser.Size( 500, 320 ); WebBrowser.hOffset = 30;  WebBrowser.vOffset = 10;  WebBrowser.Url = “http://inld50047051a/abesh/quality.irpt”; WebBrowser.BlackRectangle = true; WebBrowser.TopMost = true; Now instead of an Image we have a Java Applet that is displayed in the Widget (the quality.irpt file has a xMII SPC Chart Applet embedded within it) which allows us an unprecedented amount of interactivity.  The simple WebBrowser4Widgets window : image Now interactivity examples : Display Alarms… imageimage Display Comments : image  The API for WebBrowser4Widgets SDK can be found here.  However there is Caveat to using this COM Extension for Yahoo Widget ! It is NOT FREE! The Evaluation version has a 10 minute timeout period. And their registration policy is such that the registration cost varies everyday ! However when it was first released, it was released as a free version.

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      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member
      I always wanted to make a widget that used its own internal animation to deal with the local UI, but present rich Flash Animations as the content.  Now I can do this, thanks for the info.

      -d

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member
      They must probably be hosting a IE Browser control on their own control. We can probably write a free and open source version of the same. Flash on Yahoo widgets... it does sound promising. 🙂
      Author's profile photo Abesh Bhattacharjee
      Abesh Bhattacharjee
      Blog Post Author
      You are absolutely bang on ! I think they've created a wrapper on the IE Object ! I do not have enough programming knowledge to do the same and create a COM Object ! Anyone from the Community ?
      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member
      Hello,

      I'm founder and owner of CentralTopic.com and also the author of WebBrowser4Widgets COM library.
      Thank you for developing my product.

      As former SAP employee (9years @ SAP Poland - last position SAP NetWeaver Product Manager - i005870 )  i see some opportunities to offer WebBrowser4Widgets as part of SAP Widgets Fundation and open the source (and the idea) of this product.

      If SAP will decide to sponsor this development - is ready to use right now.
      The hottest news from my lab:
      WebBrowser4Widgets CAN call SAP BAPI and Function Modules and produces HTML output (+ CSS +XSLT +Ajax +DOM Navigation +Widget binding, and more ) directly, (without VBS of course).
      Some samples will be ready within a week.

      In the meantime I can offer free licensing WebBrowser4Widgets for SAP Widget Team.

      If this sounds interesting for you or the SAP Widget Team - please contact me.

      Best regards,
      Tadeusz Hupalo
      Central Topic
      email: tadeusz.hupalo@CentralTopic.com