Google Gadgets for WebSphere Portal have arrived

By Nick Hortovanyi

Found this article, Enhancing your portal using Google Gadgets with WebSphere Portal V6.0 ,on developerWorks.

This article addresses my previous concerns regarding what type of Google Gadgets are going to be made available and how they are to be provisioned through WebSphere Portal. I believe the Desktop Google Gadgets are not being made available.

I'll need to give it a whirl shortly and will write another blog entry with the results of the experiment. This integration is very exciting as it is bringing previously Internet only type technology back through the firewall into the corporation.

What I have noticed is that the preferences for the Customization node are stored in the standard portlet preferences.

One thing that I have not seen as yet is the ability to do inter-portlet communication through the property broker to enable wiring between other JSR-168 portlets and the IBM Portlet for Google Gadgets. Why would you want to do this? Well to do effective mashups you need to be able to communicate between portlets/gadgets. For example, you receive a customer inquiry with an address, click on the address and the user should be able see the corresponding map on the Google Map Gadget on the same page. Would be good if someone from IBM or Google can tell us how to do this?

Tags jsr-168 portal gadgets ibm google   |  Comments 0

WebSphere Portal & Google Gadgets with a Linux desktop

By Nick Hortovanyi

Have been reading about how WebSphere Portal will be supporting Google Gadgets. eWeek has written a great article on it - IBM Links Google Gadgets to WebSphere Portal.

I know its a bit early but I started to investigate what does this mean.

According to Google Code, there are two types of Gadgets:

• Universal Gadgets - Works with the Google homepage, Google Desktop, or your own webpage;and
• Desktop Gadgets - Works with Google Desktop.

Google Desktop only works on Microsoft Windows. I'd love it to work on my Linux desktop as well. Does anyone know if this is going to happen? SuSe Linux Enterprise Desktop supports .NET through Project Mono.

Thus if the Google Desktop Gadgets are to be made available through WebSphere Portal they will not work on my Linux Desktop. Someone correct me here if I'm wrong! Google Desktop Gadgets are written in JavaScript, C, C++, C#, and/or VB.Net . Google why can't we use Java, Python, Ruby etc? Is this a sign of Google being Evil?

Now I know Google Univeral Gadgets will work on linux, because i've tried them, so I'd be confident in saying that these would work through WebSphere Portal on my linux desktop.

Can anyone from IBM or Google add some colour here?

Will I finally be able to decomission all my Windows desktops or not?

Tags gadgets google ibm portal   |  Comments 0