Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Enhanced widgets support

i had been working on the widgets support, enhancing the communication system and support between hummingbird and the widgets.
on the following picture you will see a new button on the tools window:


At 'design time' (in the designer), when you select a widget and press this button hummingbird will prompt the widget for a properties window, this window will be presented to the user and using this an user will change the properties values. So this is the way a widget will provide its configuration settings to an user, allowing set its appearance (or skin), its data source, and so on.
The configuration settings will be saved later when the designer save the page. At that moment hummingbird will ask the widget for its settings (in xml format) and it will take that info and will proceeds to store it on the server.
in a similar way when a page is loaded hummingbird will load the settings for every widget on the page and will send that info to the corresponding widget, so the widget is configurated.
On the following picture you will see a simplified schema showing this:

I have developed two widgets for testing, and i must to say it works great.
At this point i am very happy with the new feature, because it opens new possibilities for hummingbird and is very important to make it expandable.
In hummingbird a widget is not an isolated entity. A widget offers properties, methods, and will fires events in response to user interaction. the page's designer could write an script to respond to some events fired for a widget, he or her could control the widget programmatically, or a widget could communicates with other widgets or components on the page, or send/receive data from remote services. this is a very powerful concept. The widget´s designer will decide the way a widget communicates with others components.
It open too new business possibilities developing widgets for hummingbird. These widgets could be developed for some partner ? maybe. these are thoughts of mine.

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