Tiny Weather forecast Widget

Some of the original Weather Widget users, asked us about the availability of a version of this widget that would have smaller minimum width and height values without offering less information. This is where JavaScript comes in. In our opinion, the weather icon, the temperature and the precipitation info are the most important ones, so we have decided to hide the others in a hidden block that nicely appears when clicking the weather icon which happens to be a sun these days ;-) If you would have preferred other info on top, you can always post a comment on this blog entry. If you want to embed this 'Tiny Weather Widget' in your website or blog, you can fetch the JavaScript code from Google by clicking these links of the dutch version and/or the french version.

Books Top 10 Widget

Aha, yet another widget. The Books Top 10 Widget shows the books that were selling best in the Belgian bookshops during the previous week (click the info button to know the week these figures are about). For this widget, we kept things really simple, we did not work with the Spring framework nor the Spring MVC framework anymore. At first, a Java process that uses the Quartz open source job scheduling system regulary spiders the boek.be website to check the availability of a new Excell file that contains the latest book selling data. If there is one, another Java class reads, parses and interprets this .xls file using the Apache POI libs. The result of this process is a set of xml files that contain a more structured view on this book selling data. The display of the Top 10 data is created by web-application that uses the new 'Play' framework that generates the widget's main page as well as the REST data service for every category of books (fiction, non-fiction, kids, ...). Play really is the discovery of the year as it bundles all advantages of Rails and Java together in what they call an easier way to build Web applications with Java. It’s a clean alternative to bloated Enterprise Java stacks. Check it out!

IPhone Weather Widget updated

The latest version of the Belgian Weather Forecast Widget for iPhone users still is a standards based web application with lots of JavaScripts and css tweaks but it's getting hard to tell the difference between this application and a proprietary iPhone application. iPhone users just have to open Mobile Safari and browse to this url. (This widget exists also for PC or Mac)