Well, we said a while back that we’d be ready for developers to start playing with Blueprint in a few weeks, and here we are. It’s time!

The Floodgates Are Open

Today we’ve opened up the beta versions of our Test and Submit pages on our Mobile Developers Site.

Now you can test your Widget on our development test servers to see the flow of your Widget, as well as look at your Widget’s presentation including layout, fonts and images. Once you are ready to distribute your Widget to Yahoo’s large mobile audience, submit it to the Widget Gallery so people can find and use your Widget.

Updated Blueprint

We’ve also updated the Blueprint Developer’s Guide with our latest additions and tweaks to the language. Some of the syntax has changed since the developer preview, but the same underlying principles are all still there. There’s also an SDK available for download, described below.

As mentioned above, this is all considered ‘beta’ right now. This means we’re trying to shake out our bugs and get a few remaining things into place. We wanted to make sure developers had access to this as soon as possible rather than waiting for perfection, so please forgive us if there are a few hiccups along the way. This way we can gather feedback and turn any necessary changes around quickly so we can all benefit from a strong 1.0 release.

While you are developing your snippets and widgets, please let us know about issues you run into by posting in our Developer Group. We’re looking to smooth any wrinkles around the whole test and submit flows, as well as issues with the language, etc.

Under Construction

During this beta cycle, we’ll be adding to the language over the next few weeks. These additions shouldn’t affect anything you write in the meantime. However, be warned that there may be cases which cause us to change the core language so we can get things right before we consider the language final. We’ll certainly try to keep these to a minimum, and we’ll try our best to do it in a compatible way. For example, we’ll try to deprecate one tag or construct in favor of the new, better way, and give you a few weeks to adjust your widgets before we remove the old, evil way. You could choose then to make the change immediately and update your server code, or wait until later.

Whenever we decide we are ready to call this final, we’ll be sure to communicate this to you as well as give timelines when the last remaining compatibility shims will be removed to give you time to react.

Once 1.0 is final the plan is not to make any changes to the language other than adding extensions to existing syntax.

The SDK

The downloadable SDK contains the Developer’s Guide, but it also has a sample Widget, a sample Snippet, an example Widget, and a blueprint.php file to help you emit Blueprint XML on your servers. We use it in the sample widget we include. It’s in its primordial state, but it’s an easy way to get a jumpstart on producing correct Blueprint XML. You may use the blueprint.php file as you see fit (change it, delete it, extend it). Feel free to also push patches back to us that we might choose to include in our version.

Please be sure to read the README file in the SDK as it has a lot of information about how to put your Widget together, setting up your server environment for serving Blueprint, as well as notes about known issues in this beta.

We’ll also be adding a Blueprint Demo Widget to the Widget Gallery for developers to see how all the different elements of Blueprint render on a device. Look for that to appear ‘real soon now’.

What’s Left?

We’re still working hard to finish some elements: Filter Menu, View Menu, Map, Search Box and some others. These will be rolling out over the next few weeks. You’ll see the full set of what we’ll have planned in the Developer’s Guide.

Over the next few weeks, we hope to be blogging about specific Blueprint topics. These might take the form of how-tos. For example, forms is one that probably needs explaining if you’re not familiar with XForms. It’s a little different that what you might be used to in HTML.

We’re really excited about finally opening this up to developers and we can’t wait to see all the cool stuff you end up writing. It’s never been easier to get developer content onto a mobile device and it’s just going to keep improving over the next few weeks and months. Stay tuned!