The Mash Maker Widget API is now Open!

By Robert Ennals (Intel) (25 posts) on March 18, 2008 at 11:03 am

At Mashup University on Monday the 17th of March we launched a new Open API for creating your own widgets that run inside Mash Maker:

http://mashmaker.intel.com/docweb/Widget_API.html

The API is very simple. If you can write a web page with javascript then you should be able to write a widget.

It is also very powerful. Widgets can see the data that Mash Maker has extracted from the page, add visualizations to the page, communicate with other widgets on the page, and communicate with remote servers.

Go write some widgets!

Categories: Uncategorized

Comments (4)

March 19, 2008 10:09 AM PDT


Angelo		 Hello Robert

I am writing to let you know that the application does not seem to work behind intels firewall. You can copy and paste but that is about all I am able to do. the widgets are not working at all. when you install a widget and then open the tool screen the drop down boxes are all empty and you cannot type into them so I am not understanding how the widgets are suppose to work if you cannot type in the information. for instance lets take the :LINKED DATA" widget. install it by clicking on it in the left column, then click on the tool icon which opens a screen with the following on it:

annotate what target:
follow which URL:
load which linked properties:
send cookies:

All of the boxes with the exception of the send cookies box are completely empty with no way to add the information.

Can you help?

Thank you
March 19, 2008 6:13 PM PDT


Richard Berlin		 I was at MashupU6 and Mash Maker made my day--astounding.

I'm looking forward to writing widgets, but right now I'm just cutting my teeth on the basics, e.g. learning how to edit extractors. You probably already know this, but the XPath specification is not a very robust way of locating sub-items; the extractor is broken by any hierarchy change. This is particularly true with my first published extractor, which I did for my blog page. The blog engine in use is Roller, which allows customized templates, which means it will never be bullet-proof. But it seems that even changing from one "standard" theme to another causes the extractor to break. The DIV class used for blog posts is usually the same from theme to theme, but the path that gets you there seems to be different with each theme I try.

This, of course, is a general weakness of mashups--changes in page coding can cause everything to break--and when we truly go to a "semantic" web the problem will hopefully ease. In the meantime, though, we should be looking for ways to parse pages that are somewhat less vulnerable. Perhaps there is already a way to do this in the extractor editor, and I just haven't found it?
March 19, 2008 6:52 PM PDT


Hi - this probably isn't the best place, but I couldn't quickly find another means to communicate that I can't use the Mash Maker plug-in for Firefox because it isn't compatible with FF3 - which is now in its 4th release and expected soon to be coming out of beta. So ... update please!
March 24, 2008 6:44 PM PDT

Robert Ennals (Intel)
 gus: FireFox 3 support should be coming soon. This shouldn't be particularly hard. There are just a couple of issues that need to be addressed first.

Richard: We have a new, much better, extractor editor in the lab that addresses the issues you describe and should be released soon.

Angelo: You will need to set up a firewall proxy. There should be info on this on the internal Intel Mash Maker pages.

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