Weblog:		Enterprise Services and Widgets: A Recipe for Information Access
Subject:		Rooftop vs. Enterprise Widget Framework
Date:		2008-05-15 23:30:53
From:		Richard HirschBusiness Card
Hi Dan, What is the strategy behind the two different widget platforms? Are the two different platforms addressing two different audiences? Is Rooftop more for user-created widgets and the Framework more for widgets that are created from developers? Or is the technological foundation different? Dick

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• Rooftop vs. Enterprise Widget Framework
  2008-05-15 23:57:35 Anton Wenzelhuemer Business Card [Reply]
  
  the description of rooftop is even hard to understand: is it 'AJAX based widget' composition platform or AJAX based 'widget composition platform, neither of which makes much sense to someone who has both developed Yahoo widgets and web applications using AJAX.

  
  I'd like to see a more thorough explanation too.

  
  regards, anton

  • Rooftop vs. Enterprise Widget Framework
    2008-05-19 05:28:33 Dan Woods Business Card [Reply]
    
    Anton,

    
    I asked Alexander Dreiling to confirm my understanding of the AJAX-based nature of the Rooftop platform. He said that the front-end used to created widgets is an AJAX-based web application. AJAX was used to power the development platform to make it as easy as possible for end users who wanted to create widgets. They just need a link, a browser and that’s it. Once the application is loaded users have a range of services to choose from and to combine in whatever way they would like. They then can save their work or deploy it as a Yahoo widget or as a Windows Vista Gadget (in addition to these three more formats are supported). Hence, the application provides a full-blown secure Web Service Infrastructure, Mashup facilities and the facilities to create fully functional widgets / gadgets.

    
    So, the widgets are widgets, not AJAX-based widgets. I suppose that the right language would be as follows:

    
    Rooftop has an AJAX-based development environment for creating widgets that can be deployed in standard widget frameworks.

    
    I am still working on getting an answer about when Rooftop would is recommended as opposed to the Eclipse-based environment.

    
    Cheers,

    
    -Dan Woods

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