Container vs. Kernel
A powerful part of the Clearspring Platform actually lives within the user's browser, delivered with your widget as it travels around the web. A chunk of software is served through our servers and content delivery network, and offers all kinds of capabilities to your widget and to its users:
- detailed tracking of where your widget goes in the world, how users interact with it, and how they spread it between each other.
- viral sharing, allowing users to do things like post your widget to their own social networking pages
- awareness and management of complex configuration parameters in the backend, not in widget URLs
- advanced API services that let your widget do more interesting things; custom event tracking, advanced contextual understanding, and more
Choosing a Method
You can use these capabilities in two fundamentally different ways:
- Configure your widget to be loaded by the Clearspring Container, which loads first in a page, then gives your widget access to all of these features with just about no coding
- Configure your widget to use the Kernel directly, which is a bit more advanced but gives you complete control over how the services are used, let's you be the first to load, and more
Check out the links for a more detailed description of each of these modes. Generally, these correspond to the difference between Launchpad In-Widget
Standard and
Advanced mode.
