Tip of the Iceberg

Category xpages
If you haven't been following Declan Lynch's "Learning XPages" series, do thyself a favor and go check it out. I'll wait here until you get back.

Ah, there you are. Good stuff, eh? As I was following along, I found myself wondering how I could turn his example application into a mashup - specifically, I wanted to include a widget below the locations menu that displays the current weather for the selected location. Spoiler: it's easy. And I'll walk you through exactly how to do it. If you want to view the end result before digging into the code, you can see it in action here. At first glance it'll look identical to Declan's as of part 33 of his series... but if you select a location, you'll see my new widget.

The rest of this series will show you how to create this widget in 5 ("three, sir")... 3 easy steps:

1. Create a server-side JavaScript library containing the code that will consume data from Yahoo's Weather API (another spoiler: it's only 21 lines of code... including whitespace and block closings).
2. Create a custom control that defines the layout of the widget and calls the library code to retrieve the data.
3. Include the custom control inside an existing custom control.

Let's dive in, shall we?