Friday 23 January 2009

iGoogle's getting some changes under the hood

If you've had a chance to look at recent gadgets documentation, or tried out the iGoogle developer sandbox, you're probably aware that gadgets.* is the new hotness. Sadly, the _IG_* methods are all that work in production.

Starting within the next month, iGoogle will be undergoing some significant behind-the-scenes changes. The first recipients will be gadgets in open syndication, which will gain support for gadgets.*. We've worked hard to make sure gadgets work properly with the new architecture, and gadgets that use _IG_* methods should still function properly. However, there are two things that you, as a developer, should note.

First, support for datatype=location is now deprecated, and you should use another method, such as the Google Maps API geocoder, for positional data.

Second, iGoogle will dynamically rewrite some HTML and JavaScript for faster loading and rendering times. While this is generally a good thing, some malformed HTML and JavaScript can cause problems. Make sure to wrap your JavaScript code as demonstrated by the following example to avoid many common issues:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
// js code goes here...
// -->
</script>
As always, if you have issues, let us know in the iGoogle Developer Forum.