NeTV widgets

Overview

The widgets on the NeTV are based HTML/JavaScript. Widgets are all working under events mode right now. Briefly speaking, what your widgets doing are: Fetch content from different website (e.g. faceboo, twitter), exact related parts for title, body, and picture, and send to the NeTV bridge though TickerEvent API of NeTV web services .

NeTV Loading Widgets

All the widgets are located under:

/usr/share/netvserver/docroot/widgets

There is a file called channelinfo.xml are the configurations of the widgets, which indicating which widgets will be loaded by NeTV, and the parameters of the widgets.

A sample a widgets configuration could be as follows. The name tag indicates what name will be showed in the widget list of the channel, the href is the related path of the the html file. And the parameters tag is some parameters you could set as variables of the widgets. In this example, we make this widget send 2 messages to the bridge every time.

    <widget>                                                            
      <name>ESPN Widget</name>                                          
      <href>./widgets/ESPN_0.1/index.html</href>                        
      <thumbnail>./widgets/EPSN_0.1/logo.png</thumbnail>            
      <contenttype>application/html</contenttype>                   
      <parameters>                                                  
        <parameter value="2" name="msgNumber"/>                 
      </parameters>                                                 
    </widget>            

Send Messages to the Bridge

The API used to send message is Ticker Event API. In order to use this API, we just need to format the content into title, body, image, and the NeTV will take in charge the display part. An example API call using JavaScript is showed below:

fXMLHttpRequest(vBridgePath, "post", {cmd : "TickerEvent", data : 
                                                                 "<message>" + msgContent +  "</message>" + 
                                                                 "<title>" + msgTitle + "</title>" + 
                                                                 "<image>"+picUrl+"</image>"}, 
                                                                 function(vData) {console.log(vData)}
               );

In the example, vBridgePath is the url of the bridge of NeTV:

var vBridgePath = "http://localhost/bridge";

Get Content from Different Sources

Getting content information(json, xml) usually is very troublesome, because of the cross-domain issue. YQL is a webservice from Yahoo can make the whole process much easier. Below is a simple example of using YQL to fetch a rss feed.

$(function() {
  var query = "select * from feed where url='"+rssUrl+"' LIMIT 10";
	  
  var yql_url = "http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q="+encodeURIComponent(query)+"&format=json&callback=?";
	  
  // Get the JSON data from yql;
  $.getJSON(yql_url, function(data) {
      alert(data);
  });
	  
});

Widgets

Users are allow to adjust some parameters of each widget, e.g. how many messages can be sent to the bridge each time, or the zip code of an area.

Twitter

We have two Twitter widgets. One is the Twitter search widget, which searches for a keyword in twitter and displays all the tweets containing that keyword. Another is the Twitter timeline widget, which displays the latest tweets in a user's timeline.

Twitter Search Widget

Twitter Search Widget shows the tweets containing a certain keyword. This widget using the Twitter Search APIs to get the tweets containing the keyword. More precisely, the main work of the widget is

var url = "http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q="+ encodeURIComponent(QueryKeyword) +"&rpp=" + 1 + "&callback=?";
$.getJSON(url, function(json){
    // process JSON data
    // format the message and send to the bridge.
})

Twitter Timeline Widget

Twitter Timeline Widget shows the timeline of a user. While running this widget for the first time, this widget will guide the user to input his username/password for OAuth authentication. After obtaining the access_tokens from Twitter, the tweets in timeline of a user can be displayed by NeTV. Below is the overview of the Twitter Timeline Widget:

We use xAuth APIs of Twitter to get the access_tokens. xAuth is an older version of OAuth, and it uses username/password pair to exchange access_tokens from the server. Because this is a pure HTML/JavaScript app, for convenience and simplicity, we use the Yahoo YQL Table for sending the xAuth requests to Twitter. Using above methods, the OAuth authentication part can be as simple as:

function twitterXAuth(username, password)
{
     // Prepare the YQL Query 
    var query_xAuth = "select * from twitter.xauth.token where oauth_consumer_secret='" + consumer_secret +
	"' AND oauth_consumer_key='" + consumer_key +
	"' AND username='" + username +
	"' AND password='" + password + "'";

    // The YQL url for xAuth
    var yql_xAuth = "https://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q="+encodeURIComponent(query_xAuth)+"&format=json&env=store%3A%2F%2Fdatatables.org%2Falltableswithkeys"; 

 
    // Get the access_token & access_token_secret
    // Store them in in the /psp/parameter.ini
    $.getJSON(yql_xAuth, function(data) {
        // extract the access_tokens from the return data and store them.
    });
}

Facebook

The NeTV Facebook widget will guide use to set up their Facebook account on NeTV. The following chart show the work flow of the facebook widget.

The goal for the OAuth setup is to obtain the access token from facebook. Due to the inconvenient input on TV, we use the Authenticating Devices method of Facebook. Use will get a short string on TV, and go to http://www.facebook.com/device to input the string. Then the NeTV will receive a access_token from facebook.

Weather

The weather widget fetches the weather content from the chumby server, displays the weather information of the next 7 days, with the corresponding weather image.

GroupOn

The GroupOn widget displays the on-going groupon deals of a certain city. The widget use the GroupOn API v1 to fetch the deal feeds.

http://groupon.com/api/v1/

Stock Quotes

Right now the stock widget display the stock price for IBM, Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft. Should become configurable later on.

MLB and NFL

This two widgets are both part of the sports widgets. The widget use the xml data from xmlteam:

http://sportscaster.xmlteam.com/test/

Right now the MLB widget displays the score updates of the most recent matches, and the NFL widget displays the NFL general news.

People

Shows the news on People.com

NYTimes

Shows the news on Today's News of New York Times

Engadget

Shows the news on engadget.com

Hacker News

Shows the news on Hacker News (http://news.ycombinator.com/)

ESPN

Shows the news on espn.go.com