Eviscape Hosted application is yet another tool for writing widgets; instead just writing you can host your widgets on the Eviscape Infrastructure and your widgets will be exposed to Eviscape Users. In this tutorial, I'll explain how you can write a simple widget to create slide show from your Flickr pictures. I assume that you are familier with basic HTML (Django templates), JSON and a bit of jQuery. We support Django Templates: You may use any django filters or tags to help your development. Your application will be rendered in a DIV instead of an IFRAME. This means your HTML-IDs and stylesheet ID's may conflict with ours, so please take care that you use your own namespace for your functions and variables.

• Visit http://www.eviscape.com/apps/new and register your application with us.
• On apps page, visit "Create Hosted Application"
• Creating eviscape hosted App has basicially two steps (1) HTML code (2) JSON for user settings (if any)
• Here our intention that "user" can set his/her flickr userid so we need to write some small JSON for (2)

The JSON part looks like this:

{"flickr_id":{"required":true, "help_text":"Your Flickr User ID"}}

All varibles defined in JSON dict will be passed to HTML part during runtime. It means {{ flickr_id }} will be available to HTML part. If you'r using jQuery then you do not need to load jQuery again in your application since we are using it within eviscape so you can directly access jQuery.

Final HTML can be viewed here:

http://www.eviscape.com/apps/source/vk3my16uovg0fzwju0o95qwz622yi92q

Where is our share on eviscape url? I'd like to actually use it ;)

A little bit of promotion: Eviscape and EviscapeUI profiles are now posting to to twitter account http://twitter.com/eviscape

We'r loading jQuery by default with "$j" in all eviscape apps. You may use it or load your own version. We always use latest stable version of jquery.

$j(document).ready(function() {
   // put all your jQuery goodness in here.
 });

Trying an RSS App got me thinking about the App permissions model - and i just wonder if we need more fine grained approach?

Chatting with Deepak about navigation of the Apps pages...

Deepak favours putting the Apps menu on top of the page (again) - I originally moved it from there because it was confusing. Now that Apps are becoming more important (because of musicpictures.com integration etc) we need to have better navigation for Apps - and maybe for External Services (e.g. twitter) and Open ID too. i.e. these are all "add ons" or "extra connections" to eviscape.

For instance, if you are trying to break the connection between musicpictures and evisacape do you look in My Apps, Authorised Apps, External Services (via Edit Profile) or Open ID (via Account Settings)?

Deepak suggested a drop down list:

+ manage apps (manage the ones you have authorised)
+ apps gallery (browse all apps)
+ register new app (register a new app (as a software developer))
+ Your apps (apps you have already registered as a software developer)

but that still leaves out:

+ External Services
+ Open ID

And maybe we should separate the developer options - at least putting them under a separator in a drop down list.

Deepak feel free to correct / edit. :-)