on Jan 30th, 2009Service Widgets and e4
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?
Sure – e4 sounds like a good place to start a discussion about this. Btw, the e4 photo demo app already has an embedded browser showing Google Maps. We just don’t have anybody who is pushing in this direction… how about you?