Most of the examples in this developer guide are written in English. This document describes resources available to users who are interested in creating non-English gadgets.
One of the most useful characteristics of gadgets is that their source code is publicly visible. You can learn a lot about gadget development just by looking at how other gadgets are implemented.
To find gadgets written in a particular language, filter the content directory according to your country and language preference. You can either use the More Languages menu in the content directory to do this, or you can specify language and country codes in the URL. For example, to see Japanese gadgets, use this URL:
http://www.google.com/ig/directory?gl=JP&hl=ja&root=/ig&dpos=top
The parameter for country code is gl,
and the parameter for language code is hl. In this
example, the country code is JP for Japan, and the language
code is ja for Japanese (by convention language codes
are lowercase and country codes are uppercase, but this is not
a requirement). If you supply just the country code or just the
language, the contents of the directory vary slightly. For the
most specific results, include both the country code and the language
code.
Filtering the directory is a good way to find gadgets written
in a particular language, but it does not return only the
gadgets written in the target language. Strictly speaking, gadgets
are not tagged by language. The gadgets API includes
a <Locale> tag,
but it is optional. The
directory displays gadgets for a particular locale based on
popularity. So, for example, if you display the directory for the
locale Japan/Japanese, you will see mostly Japanese gadgets. But you
may also see non-Japanese gadgets that are popular in that locale.
Note: For a list of the countries and languages supported by gadgets, see Supported Languages and Countries.
From the content directory, you can add add gadgets to your iGoogle page. Once they're on iGoogle, you can view their source code by clicking their links in the developer gadget. Note that non-custom gadgets (for example, gadgets that simply display feeds) are not listed in the developer gadget.
Gadgets use UTF-8 encoding for non-English languages.
The gadgets API supports UTF-8 encoding for XML attribute
values and in the <Content> section.
When your content type is set to html, UTF-8 is
explicitly set as the default encoding. You should not try
to set this yourself.
If you create a gadget that supports multiple languages, translated message strings live in external XML files called message bundles. The message bundles that contain the translated strings for each locale your gadget supports must be explicitly saved in UTF-8 format.
See Internationalization for detailed information on how to create multi-lingual gadgets.
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