Hi everyone,
in our research group at Chemnitz University of technology we are developing several tools around W3C widgets, which we think might be also interesting and useful for others. I would like to introduce them here on the mailing list first and would be happy to get your feedback, criticism and suggestions. The first tool, the so called Inter-Widget-Communication Extender [1][2], lets one enrich W3C widgets with messaging facilities, i.e. make them publish/subscribe to global event bus when some events like form submission or clicks on table rows happen. This way widget can exchange data (e.g. submitted parameters or table data) with other widgets, e.g. when integrated in a dashboard like Apache Rave. To do this, the tool records user actions within the widget and asks him to provide their semantics (i.e. event and parameter names). Afterwards the tool injects several JS files into the widget package so that the widget starts emitting messages each time the recorded actions are detected. The advantage of the approach is that no manual intrusion into the widget code is needed. The tool performs IWC extension automatically. Another tool, the so called W3C Widget Converter [3], enables to convert several proprietary widget formats into W3C widgets. Currently supported formats are Opera, Netvibes and iGoogle gadgets. The best conversion rates are reached for the Netvibes widgets, whereas it was also possible to convert iGoogle gadgets and Opera widgets (see conversion rates on the homepage). There are a lot of apps in the Netvibes repository [4] and with help of the tool we are now able to import them and use within Apache Wookie or Rave. So, feel free to visit the links below and try out the tools. We hope youll find them useful and will provide us your feedback. Thank you in advance! References: [1] IWC-Extender Homepage: <http://vsr.informatik.tu-chemnitz.de/demo/iwc-extension/> http://vsr.informatik.tu-chemnitz.de/demo/iwc-extension/ [2] IWC-Extender Demo: <https://vsr-web.informatik.tu-chemnitz.de/iwc-extender/> https://vsr-web.informatik.tu-chemnitz.de/iwc-extender/ , see last 3 widgets: weather, map and tabletest [3] W3C Converter Homepage: <http://vsr.informatik.tu-chemnitz.de/demo/w3c-widget-converter/> http://vsr.informatik.tu-chemnitz.de/demo/w3c-widget-converter/ [4] Netvibes Apps: <http://eco.netvibes.com> http://eco.netvibes.com Best Regards, Olexiy --- Chemnitz University of Technology Department of Computer Science Distributed and Self-organizing Systems Group Straße der Nationen 62 D-09107 Chemnitz Germany E-Mail: [email protected] WWW: <http://vsr.informatik.tu-chemnitz.de/people/chudnovskyy> http://vsr.informatik.tu-chemnitz.de/people/chudnovskyy Phone: +49 371 531 39146
