Making a cross-platform AJAX-based web application

1. Introduction

I will go through how to make a full-blown widget that uses AJAX technology. It fetches news from a newsfeed source, presents them nicely to you, includes some eyecandy and of course lets you customize the amount of news items, refresh time and which category of news you want to be shown.

In addition, the widget will also be able to run as a regular client-side web application, for instance on a cell phone or inside a desktop browser. I will use open standards where possible, but some corner-cases might not be as cross-browser as they might have been I had spent more resources on them. The widget is intended to run in the Opera browser and for mobile surfing there are not any real alternatives to Opera's browser.

Hopefully you have already worked your way through the tutorial and played with simple widgets. If not, you should do that to get familiar with them. You should also have some familiarity with HTML, JavaScript and CSS but you will still be able to learn a thing or two if you do not.