gDesklets
Gdesklets was by Martin Grimme (now partner at Lintegra Open Source & Security ) and Christian Meyer ( University of Passau ) was launched. It is a free, written in PyGTK widget framework. Small desklets (a combination of the words desktop and applet), can be placed anywhere on the desktop. gdesklets is so flexible that it not only runs on Gnome, for which it was originally designed, but also on KDE, Xfce, Fluxbox and many others, as long as the required GNOME libraries are installed.
The framework can be extended by so-called controls, since the desklets even run in a sandbox and can not communicate directly with the system. This has the advantage that malicious code can not damage the system. The desklets themselves are a dialect of XML, the ADL ( = applet Description Language ) is called. ADL is similar to HTML very easy to learn and prepare themselves for inexperienced users no problems. By inline scripting to desklets can bring to life. Inline scripting here means that both XML, as well as mesh Python code that can be accessed ie XML elements and this can be changed: