Hello Scott & Marcos,
First I am pleased to hear that you are interested in the proxifying
mechanisms. When you say Marcos:
<< This might not be too much of an issue so long as the author
declares which domains they want to communicate with. That way, the
widget engine can allow access to the desired domains without
requiring a server-side proxy as an intermediary.>>
As I understand it, your concern is to keep the native XMLHttpRequest
object for communications and then not introduce any new proxyfing API
inside the Widget API ? However, using the current XMLHttpRequest
object in existing browsers, how would it be aware of the white list
mechanism (the desired domains) ? Our concern in our implementations
was to run in existing browsers, hence the proxy solution... But maybe
I misunderstand what you call the "widget engine" in your sentence ?
There is also another point I would have been interested to know if
webapps is interested about. It's about what we called the "State
coupling between widgets". In the PALETTE Portal (myWiWall), it
consists in the addition of 5 methods to the widget API that allows:
1/ widgets to notify and subscribe to events from other widgets
2/ widgets to define draggable data and to subscribe to drop events
(this was build on top of 1/)
We have implemented these mechanisms and it supports real world use
cases (see for instance snapshots [1] and [2] which we discuss in [3]).
Is inter-widgets communication something you are heading too in the
widget APIs and Events specification ? If this is the case, we could
provide you with a more detailed description of what we have done. I
have also seen that the latest draft of widget APIs and Events (22
January 2009) introduces a showNotification and a
WidgetModeChangeEvent interface, but as far as I understand, this can
also be dealt with a more general inter-widgets communication API.
Regards,
Stéphane S.
---
[1] http://tinyurl.com/palette-mywiwall-dnd-weather
[2] http://tinyurl.com/palette-mywiwall-dnd-translate
[3] Talk about widgets - http://groups.google.fr/group/talk-about-widgets
