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Develop mobile widgets with Yahoo! Blueprint

Create a weather widget

C. Enrique Ortiz, Founder and principal, Artemis Wireless Werks
C. Enrique Ortiz is a long-time mobile technologist and blogger. He is a mobility enthusiast, practitioner and professional, with many years of experience in end-to-end mobile computing.

Summary:  Developing mobile applications can be a daunting task. With hundreds of handsets to develop against and support, mobile application development can be time consuming and costly. Fortunately, Yahoo! Blueprint helps alleviate this pain by providing a single way to develop mobile applications. With Blueprint, you can author a mobile application one time that can be targeted at mobile devices with a browser (or devices that support the Blueprint platform), allowing you to potentially reach thousands of users. In this tutorial you will see how to develop a weather mobile widget using the Yahoo! Blueprint platform.

Date:  11 Nov 2008
Level:  Intermediate
PDF:  A4 and Letter (417 KB | 36 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

Activity:  9677 views
Comments:  

Before you start

This tutorial is for developers interested in learning how to develop mobile widget-based applications using the Yahoo! Blueprint platform. While this tutorial is for entry-level developers, general knowledge about Web applications, mobile applications, XML, and PHP is desirable, but not essential.

About this tutorial

Yahoo! created Blueprint as a way to author mobile applications for its mobile platforms, including Yahoo! Go, software that connects mobile devices to the Internet. With Blueprint, Yahoo! has created a complete end-to-end toolset for the development of mobile applications, but has also created a global ecosystem of developers designing Blueprint-based mobile applications.

After completing this tutorial, you will understand what Blueprint is all about. Our weather widget uses PHP on the server, uses Blueprint XML, and consumes the Yahoo! Weather Web service for the current weather conditions. This tutorial covers the following topics:

  • Introduction to the Yahoo! Blueprint platform
  • Application components and organization
  • The Blueprint XML language and user interface elements
  • Developing, packaging, testing, and publishing the weather widget

Prerequisites

You will need the following tools to follow along with this tutorial:

  • Get the Yahoo! Blueprint SDK.
  • A Web server running on any operating system with PHP 5.1. This server is responsible for serving your widget-specific application logic. You can set up your own server configuration, or use a hosting service that provides Apache and PHP. See the Resources section at the end of the tutorial for information on setting up and configuring Web servers, including the Apache Web server.
  • Get PHP v5.2.
  • A plain text editor, or better. An IDE with support for PHP syntax is ideal. In my case I like to use the NetBeans IDE, which provides a PHP extension module.

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