Sanjiva Weerawarana wrote: > > > I agree with Todd- I call these things "integration-ready applications." > Basically IMO an application should be a service + a human UI. With AJAX, > its of course now possible to do the entire human UI bit on the browser > only and not have a presentation layer on the server at all. That's how we > write all of our management consoles (applications) for WSO2 products- a > set of services + an AJAX UI. > > The advantage of course is that the "application" can immediately be > integrated (aka mashed up) with other services to create new services and > applications without having to screen scrape or do any such ugly reverse > engineering work.
Are you designing you AJAX UI as a single DIV component, or is it a complete HTML page? How would you make changes to integrate that UI with another UI into a single page/pane. One of the things about the Jini ServiceUI spec is the use of the UI factory interfaces, such as JComponentFactory. These factories receive the ServiceItem object as an argument to a method, such as getJComponent(), and return the JComponent, JFrame, JDialog etc needed to represent the UI to the user. Thus, a 3rd party can design a UI around combining multiple UIs into one. My Jini desktop environment takes avantage of this to turn JComponent UIs into JInternalFrames inside of a JDesktopPane so that I can build an MDI out of as many services as needed, and the user can elect which ones to open at what moment. They can also be put into tabs, opened as frames/dialogs etc. This makes is really quick and easy to add UIs to an environment and allow the user immediate knowledge and access to things through the fact that the service discovery will find these services without new pages and navigation designs to need to occur too. Gregg Wonderly
