OpenLinkz

In my work to maintain a widget that retrieves stock quote data continuously throughout the day I have ended up experimenting with several different approaches.

As discussed in my last post, WidgetBox on its own will not provide the required functionality so we migrated to Google gadgets. In working with the Google gadget libraries, I initially used their XML-HTTP request as a work-around by preventing the test for an XML structure in the response. Eventually, I found that this approach was actually not as reliable as I had hoped. In looking for an alternative, I found that Google also had a function that retrieves simple text data across domains.

Since the raw stock quote data from Yahoo! is CSV text, this text retrieval function turns out to be the most efficient in terms of speed, being light weight and, most importantly, will run continuously and reliably as long as a user is viewing the page, even if it's all day.

The Google gadget libraries are clearly more flexible and provide someone willing to dig through the documentation greater control and power over the functionality within a widget/gadget.