Introducing Shindig-dnd

As part of our core strategy at Life360, we are building a developer API that will allow third-party developers to create their own widgets (web-based components based on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) on our platform. Included in this strategy is a web console which allows users to view and arrange the various widgets they want to use. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we went out in search of a project that could help us fulfill our goal. Enter the Shindig project, an open source Apache incubator project that allows us to serve our widgets.

Unfortunately, the Shindig project does not come with the ability to drag-and-drop the widgets. To add this functionality, one of our core developers, Matt Russell, created an extension to Shindig called Shindig-dnd. Shindig-dnd adds several capabilities on top of Shindig to provide drag-and-drop functionality similar to something like iGoogle. Since we are such huge proponents of open source software, we have decided to release this code to the world and hope that other people can find cool and interesting things to do with it.

Screencasts

Demo showing off the main capabilities of Shindig-dnd:

Quick tutorial to get Shindig-dnd installed and running:

More Info

We hope you enjoyed the screencasts. If you would like to download the code you can get it at Google Code. The code has been tested on FF3, Safari3, and IE7, but please let us know if you have any issues with it. For a more technical discussion behind this project, please check out Matt Russell’s blog. And, if you have any other questions or would like to find out more about our developer API, feel free to email me at alex AT life360 DOT com. We hope you appreciate this code; we would appreciate it if you could rate some of our widgets and come up with you own ideas of apps to build on our platform over at Life360.

Thanks!