I did a little more experimentation.
Added rawquery channel to the mylocation gadget. The rawquery is used
to publish the user entered address. Lat and long were already
published. This allows the google news subscriber demo to grab news
about the location you enter. It also allows subscriber gadgets to
put a descriptive location in the title or gadget body. Is this
proper us of the rawquery channel? The mylocation gadget can be found
at http://mikeg101.googlepages.com/mylocation.xml
Did some more experimentation with the nearby marine weather
observations gadget. It listens for lat, long and rawquery as a
group. I've been using this gadget as well as the map and news
subscriber demos to test out mylocation. The weather gadget is at
http://mikeg101.googlepages.com/nearby_stations_subscriber.xml
This may be my problem, but figured I'd report it. When I move the
nearby_stations_subscriber.xml gadget to a new location on the page, I
get stuck in a loop of the following messages: (using Firefox
2.0.0.6)
uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code:
0xc1f30001 (NS_ERROR_NOT_INITIALIZED) [nsIDOMJSWindow.setTimeout]"
nsresult: "0xc1f30001 (NS_ERROR_NOT_INITIALIZED)" location: "JS
frame :: http://167.gmodules.com/ig/f/Ysoh-2l9GAc/ifpc.js :: ifpc_ ::
line 6" data: no]
Only way to clear it is to reload the page.
I'm still wondering what we can do with this technology. Some ideas
that come to mind...
a. stock portfolio. -- click stock to publish its symbol to
subscribers that might provide graphs, news, analysis, sec info, etc
for the stock.
b. my location that allows the user to control any number of
geographically oriented subscribers - weather, restaurants, stores,
other nearby services.
c. I know there is more... publish products with separate subscribers
that return news, prices, reviews, etc.
d. maybe even something on movies or other entertainment.
What do y'all think? Where will this take us? It's bed time.
On Aug 23, 6:52 pm, "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
