A review of the widget landscape and incompatibilities between widget engines

A widget is a packaged interactive client-side application, commonly developed using Web standards and techniques to access data services both on the Web and host devices. The purpose of this paper is to review the widget landscape and present key characteristics and concerns of widget technologies. Various incompatibilities exist between widgets and the proprietary engines hosting them on different platforms. Incompatibilities can be classified by how different implementations handle issues related to packaging, behaviour, security and presentation. These common concerns, together with economic drivers have given rise to numerous standardisation efforts such as those being carried out by the W3C in drafting the widget family of specifications.