Re: Using W3C widgets in a web container: two implementations contrasted

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

Received on Tuesday, 27 January 2009 17:11:56 UTC