I think what you’re saying about the the classes is more of a barrier to this success. In poking through the JS and HTML of many of the widgets call on these classes to work. If they are coded to work locally, then they don’t transfer very well to a remote server.

I’ve just returned from the iPhoneDevCamp event here in San Francisco. These guys are all wicked smart and will hopefully have some interesting things out soon! It’s an exciting time in web/hardware integration!

There is no “Dashboard server” per se, but it’s true that some of the Apple provided classes on which a lot of widgets rely are stored on the user’s file system. If a widget relies heavily on those classes, they would need to be copied to the web server in a place where the webdget(?) could get to them. Also, things like localization and widget.system calls (accessing the user’s command-line) won’t work the same way if at all, so developers would need to take that into account.

All of that said, it’s a great idea to reuse widget code for iPhone apps. Like you say, in many cases, 90% of the code is there and available to help make the iPhone even more useful.

Cheers,
-Andrew

For instance, we’ve figured out the best way to hide the URL bar — see http://groups.google.com/group/iphonewebdev/browse_thread/thread/c064b183c1207a98/dd79332910e4695c

We have figured out how best to detect orientation change and change UI for landscape vs portrait — http://groups.google.com/group/iphonewebdev/browse_thread/thread/e041ae0357dc62dc

A lot of discussion about best practices re: viewport –
http://groups.google.com/group/iphonewebdev/browse_thread/thread/f43493a828dffdb3

Dealing with various problems of scaling — http://groups.google.com/group/iphonewebdev/browse_thread/thread/b09a202d34daab51

We are figuring out how to create objects that drag using two-finger drag — http://groups.google.com/group/iphonewebdev/browse_thread/thread/991a04799ec841f7

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