Extending Web Standards-based Widgets towards Inter-Widget Communication

Authors: Olexiy Chudnovskyy, Sebastian Müller, Martin Gaedke

Introduction

User interface mashups gained much interest both in academia and in industry last years. The end-user-oriented development paradigm, which focuses on hiding complexity of underlying technologies behind user interfaces (so called widgets), significantly lowers the barrier to start developing new Web solutions. However, UI mashups haven't reached their full potential yet. As such, widgets are currently implemented in the isolated manner, which hinders seamless user-mashup interaction due to the need of manual data transfer from one widget to another. Though mashup run-time environments often provide inter-widget communication (IWC) facilities to support this process, current widget implementation only rarely utilize it. In this paper, we present a generic approach to (semi-)automatically extend widgets towards IWC-enabled ones. Thus, many of cumbersome tasks related to data transfer between widgets can be automated, resulting in a new and better user experience.

Online Demo

To try out the system, choose one widget (e.g. the map or weather widget) and select "Train". Perform some interactions with the widget and provide the required annotations. To test the result and the compatibility of the widget with some other one, click "Test it".

Screencast

Further Readings

Olexiy Chudnovskyy, Sebastian Müller, Martin Gaedke Extending Web Standards-based Widgets towards Inter-Widget Communication (Conference Paper) Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Lightweight Integration on the Web (ComposableWeb). Berlin, Germany. July 23-24, 2012; Pages 93-96; ISBN/ISSN 978-3-642-35622-3