Orchestrated User Interface Mashups Using W3C Widgets

One of the key innovations introduced by web mashups into the integration landscape (basically focusing on data and application integration) is integration at the UI layer. Yet, despite several years of mashup research, no commonly agreed on component technology for UIs has emerged so far. We believe W3C’s widgets are a good starting point for componentizing UIs and a good candidate for reaching such an agreement. Recognizing, however, their shortcomings in terms of inter-widget communication – a crucial ingredient in the development of interactive mashups – in this paper we (i) first discuss the nature of UI mashups and then (ii) propose an extension of the widget model that aims at supporting a variety of inter-widget communication patterns.