Kapsules was a freeware desktop widget engine for Windows. It made use of the Windows Scripting Technology, allowing widget designers to use any scripting language that has an ActiveScript engine. Those widgets were then made available on Kapsules' website. As of December 2005 [update] , widgets are available in eight different scripting languages. Kapsules is reliant on the .NET Framework. All versions of Kapsules before and including version 0.9.9.0 have targeted version 1.1 of .NET, and all later versions target version 2.0.
Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines freeware unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the freeware it offers. For instance, modification, redistribution by third parties, and reverse engineering without the author's permission are permitted by some publishers but prohibited by others. Unlike with free and open-source software, which are also often distributed free of charge, the source code for freeware is typically not made available. Freeware may be intended to benefit its producer by, for example, encouraging sales of a more capable version, as in the freemium and shareware business models.
Microsoft Windows is a group of several graphical operating system families, all of which are developed, marketed, and sold by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. Active Windows families include Windows NT and Windows Embedded; these may encompass subfamilies, e.g. Windows Embedded Compact or Windows Server. Defunct Windows families include Windows 9x, Windows Mobile and Windows Phone.
.NET Framework is a software framework developed by Microsoft that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It includes a large class library named as Framework Class Library (FCL) and provides language interoperability across several programming languages. Programs written for .NET Framework execute in a software environment named the Common Language Runtime (CLR). The CLR is an application virtual machine that provides services such as security, memory management, and exception handling. As such, computer code written using .NET Framework is called "managed code". FCL and CLR together constitute the .NET Framework.
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As mentioned above, widgets could be written in any language for which there is an ActiveScript engine. Kapsules also supports .NET scripting languages. This flexibility allows widget designers to use and interface with a much larger codebase, enabling them to interface with a wider variety of existing software components. Widgets have been written in Python, PHP, JScript, JScript.NET, VBScript, VB.NET, Ruby and Perl.
Python is an interpreted, high-level, general-purpose programming language. Created by Guido van Rossum and first released in 1991, Python has a design philosophy that emphasizes code readability, notably using significant whitespace. It provides constructs that enable clear programming on both small and large scales. Van Rossum led the language community until July 2018.
PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor is a general-purpose programming language originally designed for web development. It was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994; the PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group. PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page, but it now stands for the recursive initialism PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
JScript is Microsoft's dialect of the ECMAScript standard that is used in Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
Kapsules was inspired by Arlo Rose and Perry Clarke's Konfabulator (which has recently been purchased by Yahoo! and rebranded as Yahoo! Widgets). Both are widget engines with very similar functionality. Konfabulator was originally written for Mac OS X and later ported to the Windows environment, while Kapsules was designed to use integral components of Windows. By using a managed framework, Kapsules lets designers choose from one of several scripting languages, while Konfabulator widgets are written exclusively in JavaScript. Also, Kapsules can be installed on a Windows guest account, whereas Konfabulator requires Administrator privileges.
Yahoo! is an American web services provider headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and owned by Verizon Media. The original Yahoo! company was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 2, 1995. Yahoo was one of the pioneers of the early Internet era in the 1990s.
Yahoo Widgets was a free application platform for Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows, specifically Windows XP, Vista and Win 7. The software was previously called Konfabulator, but after being acquired by computer services company Yahoo on July 25, 2005 it was rebranded. The name Konfabulator was subsequently reinstated as the name of the underlying rendering engine. The engine uses a JavaScript runtime environment combined with an XML interpreter to run small applications referred to as widgets, and hence is part of a class of software applications called widget engines. On February 27, 2012 Yahoo updated the License agreement stating that as of April 3, 2012 Yahoo! Widgets will continue to be available for download but support & Development would stop.
In software engineering, porting is the process of adapting software for the purpose of achieving some form of execution in a computing environment that is different from the one that a given program was originally designed for. The term is also used when software/hardware is changed to make them usable in different environments.
On or around November 9, 2006, the Kapsules website was updated with a single page stating that the site had been hacked. It also said that the developers were "busy" working on an updated version of the application and the website. No updates have been made since the announcement. The project website and its domain have since been abandoned.
