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Google Calendar APIs and Tools (Labs)

Calendar Gadgets Overview

Gadgets are custom HTML and JavaScript components that run within an iframe and can be embedded within various web pages. Google Calendar includes support for embedding Gadgets within the Google Calendar web interface, creating content-rich data displays and extending Calendar with additional functionality.

Gadgets can be used to create daily status icons, such as Google Calendar's built-in weather calendar. They can be use to embed web pages that are associated with a given date, such as a movie showtimes calendar that displays trailers inside of each event's description. They can also be used to add new controls, such as the "Jump To Date" and "Next Meeting" features in Calendar Labs.

Google Calendar provides two APIs for embedding Calendars, which are described below.

Event Gadgets

Event Gadgets allow web content to be embedded within a calendar. This calendar can be specific to a single user, shared with many users. These events can appear as normal events, events with icons, or standalone icons without an event "chip". When clicked, the gadget will load a specified URL inside of an iframe instead of the normal event bubble.

Event gadgets are useful when importing importing events into Google Calendar, and these events have additional information stored outside of Calendar that the user may be interested in. Some examples would be weather data, birthday reminders, movie showtimes, and other recurring, generated events. However, they offer limited JavaScript support, and do not provide access to control the Calendar UI.

Sidebar Gadgets are small, portable web applications that live in the left-hand side of the calendar UI. Supporting the gadgets.* API, these are an excellent choice whenever implementing complex functionality. They also have access to event data and Calendar user-interface controls, which also allows them to act as plugins for the Google Calendar interface.

Many of the Calendar Labs features are implemented as sidebar gadgets, including the "Jump To Date", "Next Meeting", and "World Clock" experiments. Additionally, existing Gadgets from other sites can often be converted into Sidebar Gadgets with little or no modification.