Google® Business Solutions All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 3. Adding Google Gadgets to Your Web Site

In This Chapter

• Understanding what Google Gadgets offer your Web site

• Using Gadgets for fun and for work

• Finding Google Gadgets

• Making Google Gadgets

• Adding Google Gadgets to your Web page

The dream of being able to add real programming code to your Web site has long been an elusive one. Programming would give you all the advantages of software running on a standalone PC, combined with all the flexibility, collaboration, and communication made possible by the Internet and the Web.

But there have been almost as many challenges as successes. In the early days of the Web, Java was touted as the cure to all Web programming problems — until it was finally realized that Java is better for programming across networks than on actual Web pages. So the name JavaScript was invented for a scripting language that's basically unrelated to Java.

In recent years, JavaScript has been combined with an advanced coding standard called XML, for eXtended Markup Language — a cousin of HTML — to form Ajax, or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. (JavaScript is always asynchronous — that is, it runs in your Web page separately from any code running on the back-end server — so the word was apparently added just to create a good acronym.)

If you want to know more about both Java and JavaScript, visit java.net, "The Source for Java Technology Collaboration." The diagram in Figure 3-1 is a simplified version of the interaction among JavaScript, XML, and a few other "players" ...