[widgets] Implementing Google Wave with W3C Widgets

Hi everyone,

Something that may be of interest if you've been following the  
announcement of Google Wave[1].

Back in January we discussed our W3C Widgets implementation  
(Wookie[2]), and our extensions to cover shared states and  
collaboration[3], a demo of which we brought to the Paris F2F.

Well, Google Wave has a very similar API to our own for adding  
collaborative Gadgets to waves[4], so we've implemented the draft API  
and mapped it onto our existing functionality. We then tested this by  
taking the Google Sample Wave Gadgets[5], and converting them to W3C  
Widgets (removing Gadget markup, and adding config.xml). We've then  
successfully deployed these using Wookie in a web application (see  
screenshot[6]).

These work pretty much as demonstrated by Google, but using our  
existing Wookie codebase, which uses Comet to achieve synchronous  
updates between Widget instances.

(You can see how the API calls work in the test harness widget on the  
left of the screenshot).

This raises the question as to whether and how we want to progress the  
collaboration/shared state Widget extensions?

Cheers,

Scott

[1] http://wave.google.com/
[2] http://getwookie.org
[3] http://www.mail-archive.com/public-webapps@w3.org/msg01849.html
[4] http://code.google.com/apis/wave/extensions/gadgets/guide.html
[5] http://code.google.com/apis/wave/samples/index.html
[6] http://img.ly/DL


/-/-/-/-/-/
Scott Wilson
Assistant Director, JISC CETIS
University of Bolton

Projects:
FeedForward: http://getfeedforward.org
Wookie: http://getwookie.org

scott.bradley.wilson@gmail.com
http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott