Service Widgets and e4

January 30, 2009 | 1 min Read

Yesterday I stumbled upon a pretty interesting google code project, the Google Visualization API.  The Google Visualization API enables you to expose your own data through a number of Visualization Widgets, which are made available as a service.

Here is a screenshot from the geo map widget:

Google Graph Widget

This got me thinking: Is there place for “service widgets” in the Eclipse platform (possibly in e4)? These could likely be used with RAP fairly easily, but we could also wrap these up with the browser widget and expose a Java API similar to SWT/JFace (or even an EMF model to represent the data) for rich client applications. Of course, for these to work your users would have to be connected to “the cloud”.

Thoughts?

Ian Bull

Ian Bull

Ian is an Eclipse committer and EclipseSource Distinguished Engineer with a passion for developer productivity.

He leads the J2V8 project and has served on several …