In the former article of the series We rendered the user interface of our widget inside an anchor element in publisher’s website; We asynchronously loaded widget styles; We implemented a very naive authentication mechanism. We also defined a job queue _wdq (similar to google analytics’ _gaq) to be able to …

I’m giving a talk on JavaScript Widget development best practices tomorrow at jstanbul 2012. At the conference, I will have a 30-minute timeframe to express as much as I can with respect to external JavaScript widget development best practices. Since 30 minutes is not enough for this, my aim is …

In the former part of the series we’ve seen how to revalidate the cache and load our widget code using a self updating bootloader script. Now it’s time to pass initialization parameters to our widget, and request some state data from the widget API server. Let’s recap: Our lovely publisher …

In the former post we have outlined a broad brushstrokes initialization flow of our external JavaScript Widget: What we did was to basically create a bootloader script that first loaded required resources asynchronously and then continued its flow with the initialization and rendering of the widget. Currently, those initialization and …

In the former part of the series we had a brief introduction on challenges in developing JavaScript widgets. In this article, we’re going to continue from where we left: We will start by installing necessary instruments to develop and test our code. First Things First Before we start actual coding, …

This is the beginning of a new article series where we will see best practices, common pitfalls, and “how to”s on creating JavaScript Widgets for external sites. Throughout the examples we will be using: node.js for the server; On top of node, expres.js framework as a higher-level abstraction; mongodb for …