I wasn’t planning on making the intro a two part post, but the more I thought about what I had missed out on my first post I wanted to follow up with a second post to cover some of the more important things I had missed.

One of the main benefits of the Google home is that is platform independent, you just need a compatible browser, the main browsers work just fine, I’ve tested it with Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2.0 beta as well as IE6 and IE7, I’m pretty confident that other browsers work just fine also.  It uses a combination of AJAX and DHTML to perform its magic.

Development is fairly straightforward using JavaScript and XML to perform the majority of tasks.  The widget I built uses JavaScript and an RSS feed for its data.  The built in functions that Google provide handle a lot of the XML parsing and retrieval of data from external sources with ease.

To be able to customize your own page you do need to register, if you have a gmail account you’re in luck, but registration is easy plus your account can then be used for some of the other great Google services.

My next intro is going to cover the Yahoo! Widget engine, keep your eyes open for it.

Technorati Tags: Google home, Google, Google widgets