This weekend I was working on some SFU community sites and I decided it would be nice to display the SFU ULife calendar on one website in particular. SFU ULife is a community building initiative which aims to increase the visibility of the community and events at SFU in a pledge to increase student involvement and awareness. Read more about ULife’s goals Here.
For those of you who read about the re-launching of the SFU Bookswap website (http://sfubookswap.com), you may remember that one of the new features was the integration of the Google Books database.
In this entry I am going to talk about how I integrated the Google Book Search functionality into my existing Dojo framework.
Dojo (http://dojotoolkit.org/) is a wonderful javascript toolkit which just reached version 1.0 at the beginning of November. I have been watching and developing with Dojo for a couple years now and I can’t tell you how excited I am to have passed the version 1 milestone
Greasemonkey (http://www.greasespot.net/) is a handy Firefox extension which allows the injection of javascript (called userscripts) into the webpage currently being viewed. This allows for the customization of the look and feel of a website: improving the user interface or adding additional functionality.
In this example, we are going to use greasemonkey and Dojo to display a dialog widget on an arbitrary website.