What about GadgetTabML ? Anyone interested in experimenting with widget "spaces" portability and sharing ?

[Stephane]

Dear all,

There were quite a few presentations concerning widgets at the
MUPPLE'09 workshop [1].

In one of these presentations [2], I proposed the idea that as there
are more and more projects developing new widget platforms, it would
be interesting to agree on a file format to be able to export/import a
set of widgets (which I call a "space") and their configuration
between these platforms.

It seems Google has made a first move into that direction by using a
GadgetTabML format [3]. However I could not find any documentation
about it, hence does any one here could tell us where to find more
information about it ? Also does anyone has plan to support it in its
platform or to develop a similar functionality ? [Scott if I
understand Wookie this is not relevant for it because there is no
concept of Widget space in Wookie, there are only individual widget
instances shared in a context which is an orthogonal concept ?]

Once there is an agreed format for sharing widget spaces, a follow up
idea is to leverage it to describe different ways of sharing (this is
detailed in the paper through scenarios such as cloning, broadcasting
it from one user, or co-editing it, which are described with a simple
syntax to support it). In this regard, I really think that if we cross
this idea with a client-side architecture for widgets (which has been
discussed in a previous thread in this group), and with a mixed
browser/server such as Opera Unite [4], then it would be quite
feasible to implement the following scenario: user A creates a widget
space (compositing several widgets in a page), user A sends a link to
user B to share his widget space, and finally user B connects to user
A's widget space and they start to share it.

I would like to know if anyone is exploring this scenario at that
time, a similar scenario or if anyone is interested in going into that
direction (with cross-platform sharing that would be great) ?

Stéphane S.
---

[1] MUPPLE Program.
http://CEUR-WS.org/Vol-506/

[2] Stéphane Sire, Matthias Palmér, Evgeny Bogdanov and Denis Gillet.
Towards Collaborative Portable Web Spaces
http://CEUR-WS.org/Vol-506/sire.pdf, and the presentation is available
at:
http://www.slideshare.net/stsire/towards-collaborative-portable-web-spaces

[3] you can find an "export" button in the iGoogle settings panel

[4] http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/an-introduction-to-opera-unite/

[Scott Wilson]

On 5 Oct 2009, at 19:06, Stephane wrote:

[Scott if I  
understand Wookie this is not relevant for it because there is no  
concept of Widget space in Wookie, there are only individual widget  
instances shared in a context  which is an orthogonal concept ?]

That is correct; however if an application wanted to generate a "tabML" type file, they can use the Wookie REST API [1] to collect the metadata. While the API was designed with instance management in mind, I think all the information an application might need is present - the Widget metadata, instantiation information, participants, and instance state properties. 

There is also a method for cloning an existing Widget Instance and all its shared state information - send a PUT for an instance and pass it "action=clone & cloneshareddatakey=newcontextid" and it returns a new instance keyed to the new shared state id but containing a copy of all previous state data.

Happy to add additional methods to the API to the proposed 0.8.2 Wookie API spec if there any gaps.

[1] http://cwiki.apache.org/WOOKIE/wookie-rest-api.html

[Ivan Zuzak]

Hi Stephane,

Haven't had a chance to look at your paper in full so some of the
comments below might be re-stating the obvious.

On Oct 5, 8:06 pm, Stephane <sts...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> There were quite a few presentations concerning widgets at the
> MUPPLE'09 workshop [1].
>
> In one of these presentations [2], I proposed the idea that as there
> are more and more projects developing new widget platforms, it would
> be interesting to agree on a file format to be able to export/import a
> set of widgets (which I call a "space") and their configuration
> between these platforms.
>
> It seems Google has made a first move into that direction by using a
> GadgetTabML format [3]. However I could not find any documentation
> about it, hence does any one here could tell us where to find more
> information about it ? Also does anyone has plan to support it in its
> platform or to develop a similar functionality ? [Scott if I
> understand Wookie this is not relevant for it because there is no
> concept of Widget space in Wookie, there are only individual widget
> instances shared in a context which is an orthogonal concept ?]

I've never seen this feature in iGoogle before. I'm guessing they put
it in for helping the Data Liberation Front effort - http://www.dataliberation.org/.
It's a really nice thing to have for portability. You're right about
the shortage of information about the GadgetTabML spec - no
information about the format on the web or any of the related support
groups. I'll try posting a question on the iGoogle support forum and
see if someone takes the call.

> Once there is an agreed format for sharing widget spaces, a follow up
> idea is to leverage it to describe different ways of sharing (this is
> detailed in the paper through scenarios such as cloning, broadcasting
> it from one user, or co-editing it, which are described with a simple
> syntax to support it). In this regard, I really think that if we cross
> this idea with a client-side architecture for widgets (which has been
> discussed in a previous thread in this group), and with a mixed
> browser/server such as Opera Unite [4], then it would be quite
> feasible to implement the following scenario: user A creates a widget
> space (compositing several widgets in a page), user A sends a link to
> user B to share his widget space, and finally user B connects to user
> A's widget space and they start to share it.

So, this would be a scenario different from the current "Share this
tab" in iGoogle, right? In your scenario, user A and user B would work
on the same space, not copies of the same space, and for example - if
user A deletes a widget from the space, user B would also see that the
widget has been deleted? That definitely sounds useful.

> I would like to know if anyone is exploring this scenario at that
> time, a similar scenario or if anyone is interested in going into that
> direction (with cross-platform sharing that would be great) ?

When my research group was creating demo widgets for Geppeto -
http://geppeto.fer.hr/, we were thinking about this kind of
collaborative editing model also (but never implemented it). A use
case that we though of was in teaching Operating Systems courses at
universities - we developed a set of widgets that simulated the
internal execution environment of operating systems (semaphores,
message queues, task queues, program counters etc.) and though it
would be really cool if a teacher could create a space with these
widgets, configure them, share the space with all of the students and
then lead the students step-by-step through the execution of a
process.

I'll definitely have a look at your paper! This sounds like a really
interesting path to explore.

Ivan