I am looking to create an "image slider" web part for my SharePoint 2010 site home page to display a nice glossy roll-up of our recent news articles. There are literally hundreds of jQuery plugins that will take any list of images display them in a very cool slider / rotator / accordian / carrousel for you -- so all I need to do is build a SharePoint web part which can be configured to point to a particular picture or assets library, load the media files from it, and then tell the jQuery plugin do it's thang.
Given that I am working in a sandboxed solution, what is my best approach for creating this web part?
My first instinct was to create a custom web part which inherits from the Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.WebControls.ContentByQueryWebPart class, as this would allow me to use the in-built methods of the CQWP to select all items of a particular content type and then present them in the jQuery plugin's expected format using some XSLT. Easy! The only problem howver, is that the ContentByQueryWebPart isn't available in the sandbox, and nor are the DataFormWebPart or XsltListViewWebPart classes.
I know I can create a completely custom web part, but it seems like that should be a last resort. What can I leverage out-of-the-box programmatically to make this all a little easier?
FYI: For those that are interested, this is the jQuery plugin that I am using: http://www.evoslider.com/examples.html