Topic: Opera Widget cross platform challenge

http://my.opera.com/widgets/blog/2008/10/20/enter-the-x-widget-challenge

Just ran across this interesting (and money awarding) challenge.
Opera's looking for X-Widget - that's widgets that run both on the desktop
and on mobile devices (perhaps exploiting the advantages of both?)

The concept itself is of course interesting, and while the prizes
(1st prize: $5000, 2nd prize $2000,3rd prize $1000) sure are not as
big as for the recent google android challenge,
maybe some inmate has an inspiration .

So long,

->Tyberius Prime

Google Android is open source, right? Is this?

The Presto engine which is at the core of Opera is not. The Widget spec is driven inside W3C so will not only be open but become a standard. IIRC there are even other implementors who have been tracking the spec, so Opera is not sole implementor.

And I never understood why Opera being closed source would be a good argument against it. Everything they implement is either an open standard or something they take to the appropriate standardisation organisation when it's matured a bit for standardisation. Is the platform being closed a valid argument against it when the only parts of it that are proprietary are UI?

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reisio: Define "this". Are you talking about the widgets, the widget "engine", the widget manager on mobile or something else ?

Like the rest of Opera's native code, the widget manager and engine are not open source.

But the widgets themselves and all the APIs are fully open.

The widget manifest and related APIs are standardized by the W3C. Btw NetFront recently announced, or even released, a widget engine based on the W3C spec.


Making a platform agnostic widget is a really cool challenge. It's not trivial to make a little application that adapt to various resolutions ( from 176x208 to ~VGA, with the implication on font and graphics size ) in both portrait and landscape, work well with different input devices ( joystick, stylus, mouse, ... ), ...

And the prizes aren't too shady. It's not [Dr. Evil] 1 millions dollards [/Dr. Evil], but even the intermediary prizes 50-300 USD Amazon gift card are nice.

If part is closed source, IMO there are more rewarding things to spend your time on.

Would you say making a web site is part closed source just because several browsers are in whole (e.g. ie) or in part (e.g. saf) closed source, and several of them are run on closed or partially closed operative systems, some on closed or partially closed hardware platforms? Because the client side situation is no different with regards to widgets and web sites.

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var Liorean = {
abode: "http://web-graphics.com/",
profile: "http://codingforums.com/member.php?u=5798"};

People have the option to use all open source, however.