The Gadgets Task Force, working in partnership with the IDE Working Group, is near completion of a major redesign of the mashup-oriented widget features found in the OpenAjax Metadata Specification.

The widget redesign effort, which was approved at alliance’s face-to-face meeting in October 2008, reflects implementation experience gained during the 2008 InteropFest and careful review against other widget technologies in the industry, both proprietary widget formats and the approaches used by OpenSocial Gadgets. The redesign effort has resulted in confirmation of many of the existing features (e.g., the ‘jsClass’ and ’sandbox’ attributes), along with various changes:

• Elimination of the type attribute on the content element – Previously, the type attribute could be either fragment (a snippet of HTML) or page (a complete HTML page). However, implementation experience, along with insights gained from the Security Task Force efforts around mashup authentication and authorization, convinced the Gadgets TF to drop support of the page option in OpenAjax Metadata 1.0. For widget developers who can only provide the widget in the form of a complete HTML page, the alliance will provide a sample shim widget within its open source project that shows how to use a nested IFRAME to support widgets that are delivered as complete HTML pages.
• Replacement of the view attribute with a mode attribute on the content element – Previously, OpenAjax Widgets attempted to provide a view attribute that is compatible with OpenSocial Gadgets, but the alliance concluded that the feature it needed (i.e., custom UI for edit and help) was a whole different thing that OpenSocial’s views. As a result, the view attribute has been dropped and a new mode attribute has been added. (Note: a future version of OpenAjax Widgets might restore the view attribute.)
• Redesigned and simplified widget APIs – The new widget APIs rely on standardized callback function names on the widget prototype object. The Gadgets TF concluded that the naming convention approach will be simpler and easier for widget developers.

For a complete accounting of the changes, see the OpenAjax Mashable Widgets wiki page.

The OpenAjax Metadata Specification specification, including OpenAjax Widgets, is scheduled for completion in spring 2009.