Mar
2008
In the previous post it was portrayed that how the RIA+SIO is changing the future of web development and how the shift is taking place. The important steps and the important activities to start with creating an application based on the RIA+SIO was also introduced.
In continuation of this concept introduction for the web developers here are some more important aspects focusing on the programming language and widget framework.
Programming Language Support
HTML and CSS are two specific languages befitting almost all applications. These are also more suitable for the designing of general “look” of any application. In addition to that both these languages are also favored by most of the web developers for creating web based user interfaces. For this simple reason, there exists no justification for creating another language or other tool for this.
Supporting an Open Widget Framework
As we have already noticed that the widgets are fundamental building blocks of RIAs, we will try to dig deep in to this aspect further. Currently plenty of widget development toolkits are available for web developers. Some popular tools of such type include yahoo, dojo, and ExUS. Apart from these, certain standalone widgets are also available. These standalone widgets are the creations of individuals and accomplished projects. A web developer can also make use of these pre-existing widgets. However, we are also highlighting few important aspects;
- This would be practically impossible that single widget would address to all your web development requirements. You need to have a set of widgets rather.
- You might need customized code for having integrated third-party widgets. At the same time you may also need a better understanding of your requirement as how many widgets you should have in your set and how many of them would work.
- Creating new widgets might be a bit challenging. You would be required to write to the low level API of the toolkit of your own choice. Alternatively, you may also like to start from zero and write everything on your own.
- Certain specific widget frameworks are oriented with their own widgets. In such situations, web developers will have to impart significant amount of JavaScript in order to use these widgets. It is a little more complex situation for those web developers who have no exposure with JavaScript.
In order to address the problems above, an RIA + SOA platform should provide an Open Widget Framework that has the following capabilities:
Web developers would be required to address all such challenges. It may be a little problematic initially. In order to ensure all such pre-requisites it is important that the RIA+SIO platform must provide some sort of ‘Open Widget framework’ facilitating the web developers and must enable them with supports like;
- Well conceptualized support system integration for pre-existing third party widgets.
- A support system must be in place for providing a simple API for the creation of new widgets.
- Support for enabling widgets through simple markup. This would help web developers even if they are not comfortable with JavaScript.
- A supporting distribution model facilitating web developers for submitting, locating, and using new widgets with no functional difficulties must be present.
Web developers would be greatly facilitated by the ‘Open Widget Framework (OWF)’ and will have single source for collecting widgets. It is one of the simplest methods to integrate widgets in to various applications. In case any particular widget is not being available the web developers would even then be able to create widgets with the help of an ‘open widget framework API’.
In the realm of RIA developments, widgets have their own importance. Present day widgets are increasingly becoming fragmented. Because of this reason also the open widget framework could be considered as an essential ingredient of any such RIA+SIO platform.
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