The Renderer's anatomy

This document provides simple instructions and a skeleton to build a Rendering Widget (ie: A Widget that displays a list of posts from an RSS feed).

SAPO::Widget namespace

This is where all the Widgets live. Each application's Widget should have it's own class and it's own method. For instance, Widgets for the  SAPO Tags service are all implemented in the SAPO::Widget.Tags class.

What's a Widget ?

We call a Widget, something that takes a data feed (ie: an RSS feed), manipulates the data and presents the information dynamically that's rendered in the user's Web browser. Widgets can either be static or have user controls (ie: A photo album Widget can have previous and next buttons).

SCREENSHOTS AQUI

Basics

SAPO's Widget classes are build on top our own  library. These classes often depend on other classes, depending on the functionality offered.

We can divide the Widget into 3 layers:

• The data layer (where you get the data from)
• The control layer (how you manipulate the data)
• The presentation layer (how you present the data, and draw the widget)

Data layer

Data is passed to Widgets as JSON arrays. These JSON arrays are often transformed RSS feeds. Our Webservices infrastructure provides real-time RSS-to-JSON transformations so we can have JSON arrays from any kind of RSS feed we know. This is an example  JSON feed just transformed from it's original  RSS feed.