yes-- this is the obvious design and we started with this originally.
Unfortunately, the problem is that authors would each pick
different names, and ultimately not be able to communicate with
each other. In the long run, we wanted to develop a community
of gadgets that can actually communicate in practice, but where
the authors did not know about each other's gadgets.
in this regard, Google is acting as a clearinghouse-- we understand
that this is role comes with the responsibility to listen carefully
to channel name proposals and quickly get these into production.
In the meantime, the 'testNNN' channels are available for testing
purposes.
so: go ahead and flesh out your style name proposal, try to build
consensus with other gadget authors, and we'll add this to the
official list of channel names and values.
hope this helps,
adam
Architect, Google Gadgets
On Aug 31, 5:21 am, thampan <tony.tham...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey,
> I was wondering why you choose to control the channels ? A more
> flexible approach could have been to let the publisher declare a
> channel along with its properties and subscribers can subscribe to
> particular publisher channels.
> This way developers could come up with interesting gadgets more
> easily. Like, there could be a gadget (style controller) which takes
> user colour schema preferences as input and all the listeners can
> update the style when style controller announces that the style is
> changed.
> regards,
> Tony
> On Aug 24, 4:52 am, "Dann (Google Employee)" <d...@google.com> wrote:
> > Hey everyone!
> > I'm proud to announce "Gadget-to-Gadget Communication", otherwise
> > known as PubSub, which is a killer new beta feature that's currently
> > available for you all to try out!
> > ====
> > What is "Gadget-to-Gadget Communication", a.k.a. PubSub?
> > PubSub allows multiple gadgets on the same page to send and receive
> > data from each other. In other words, you can now build a gadget that
> > communicates back and forth with one another. This introduces a brand
> > new concept and strategy involved when writing gadgets. Information
> > is no longer constrained to fit inside a single gadget. Instead, you
> > can now split up various pieces of information amongst multiple
> > gadgets and allow them to communicate with each other to paint a
> > bigger picture. Gadgets now have the ability to be more closely
> > integrated with one another and present a network of information to
> > users. If users only care about one particular segment, they can
> > simply remove or minimize any gadgets containing extraneous
> > information that they don't care about.
> > ====
> > How does PubSub work?
> > PubSub is a new framework which allows 'publisher' gadgets on iGoogle
> > to communicate changes to 'subscriber' gadgets that have declared
> > interest in those changes. This is currently available only on
> > iGoogle and publisher/subscriber gadgets must be on the same page.
> > For a list of current issues and limitations, see more information
> > below.
> > Here's documentation on how to get to started:http://www.google.com/apis/gadgets/pubsub.html
> > Here's an iGoogle tab you can add to quickly see some simple examples:http://www.google.com/ig/sharetab?source=stb&atr=PubSub&n_32=url%3Dht...
> > *Note:* As a beta feature, documentation on PubSub is not currently
> > linked to from the Google Gadgets API developer guide or anywhere
> > else.
> > ====
> > What's a BETA-feature?
> > It's an early release of a feature in order get valuable feedback from
> > real gadget developers (all of you) about the current design along
> > with some ideas on how to make it better. We can't promise that you
> > won't encounter any bugs since it's still a beta. However, when any
> > changes arise, we'll notify everyone about the change by posting it to
> > this thread. We're thrilled to hear your opinions on the design as
> > well as any creative ideas on how to use it. If you have any
> > questions or comments, please let us know.
> > In the meantime, here's the current list of limitations and known
> > issues:
> > -- Need more practical examples. Coming soon.
> > -- Does not work in Safari. Works correctly in Firefox and IE.
> > -- Only works in iGoogle. Does not work on third-party websites or
> > other container pages such as Google Desktop.
> > -- Only available to type="html" and type="html-inline" gadgets.
> > -- Does not work consistently when multiple inlined (type="html-
> > inline") "subscriber" gadgets exist on the same page in iGoogle.
> > -- Moving (drag/dropping) a "subscriber" gadget to a different
> > position in iGoogle creates an error. PubSub ceases to work
> > afterwards.
> > -- The "finance_symbol" channel described in the documentation is
> > currently broken.
> > -- Publisher gadgets cannot pass empty strings to subscriber gadgets.
> > -- JavaScript error is sometimes thrown when loading gadgets on
> > iGoogle.
> > -- Browser 'Stop' buttons sometimes have strange flickering behavior.
> > ====
> > As always, please reply back with any feedback or comments you may
> > have. We'd love to hear from you!
> > Have fun!
> > Dann
