A. Running Codes

• Demo page
• Source Codes

B. Introduction

Portal page personalization has been a hot issue. Google's personalized page is one of such examples.

There are so many issues related to customization like:

• Modulization
• Dynamic deployment
• Communication amoung gadgets
• ...

The goal of this study is to discuss and demostrate how

• extreme communication can be performed between gadgets
• dynamic gadget deployment can be carried out by other means like email
• ...

This study is still under construction. Currently, following issues I will discuss




• Why is it beyond Google's Personalize pages?

One of the key features of Web 2.0 is human being involving, a community behind the pages while a key envinonment features is communication. Gadgets are contributed by people behind the pages and communication among gadgets plays an important role on communication of people using the pages. So far I don't see much communication among gadgets in Google's Personalize pages. That is, you can't contribute a gadget to a page to impact other existing gadgets in the page.



This page show you how gadgets in a Personalize page can communicate to each other.


You may be wondering why we need the communicate amoung gadgets. Let me show you some examples that I placed in the demo page:



• Timer


The Timer (3) gadget allows users to configurate when to show their gadgets. Currently, it provides a function that hide gadget after a specified period since the gadget shown but there may be many other functions it can potentially provide like hide/show gadget within a specified period and so on.

The important point here is not the function of the Timer gadget provides but the way it impacts other gadgets: you may notice that there is no such a topic called "hide after" (in option dialog under "Subscribe Topics") until you add the Timer (3) gadget into the page (or the other way around: the topic "hide after" will disappear after you remove the the Timer (3) gadget from the page).

This means a dynamic added gadget can contribute it functionality to other existing gadgets.

You may also notice that Timer (3) gadget is completely "self-contained":

• you define the topic
• you display description
• you create the functions that carry out the timer task
• you wire the communication
• ...


all within the gadget file, gadget3.xml


• How to manage communication between gadgets?
• Some different approaches on gadgets
• Wrap more in gadgets
• How to mananger Drag and Drop with DOJO?
• ...

And following issues are available for demostrated

• Communication between gadgets?
• Define topics to broadcase
• Register as publishers to broadcase topics
You can try it by following instructions in Gadget 2 ("Control Panel").
• Subscribe broadcased topics
You can try it by having any gadget as subscriber.
• Drag and Drop environment
Try to drag gadgets in the content area or add a new gadget by dragging it from the "GadgetLib".
• ...