The problem of automating inter-widget communication in open Web environments where widgets are exposed by independent providers having no a priori knowledge on which other third-party widgets their own widgets are going to be exploited with in Web applications. Rainer Villido has proposed a solution for this in his master thesis. The main idea of the proposed solution is to create a message transformation/aggregation widget, which will listen to all messages delivered by widgets in a Web application, analyze their content, aggregate content from multiple messages, if needed, format the aggregated content and forward to widgets, which know how to interpret this content. This is achieved through the mechanism where the semantics of the content, particular widgets can interpret, is registered at the transformation/aggregation widget during Web application initialization. The aim of such an approach is to simplify creation of new Web applications from existing widgets to the level where selection of suitable widgets will be enough for Web application development.

Automating inter-widget communication, along with the widget-oriented application development paradigm, is an emerging field both in industry and academia where only few attempts have been made in abstracting inter-widget communication above technical integration details. Majority of related work has happened in the area of mashup development where vendor-specific solutions have been provided for combining Web components with tightly coupled interfaces. Moreover, current mashup platforms do not support collaboration between widgets, if widgets have been developed and maintained by different vendors and are not able to interpret messages sent by other widgets either because of message schema heterogeneity or due to the fact that content from several messages has to be combined to provide data required by the target widgets. This limits the creation of sophisticated mashups where Web components could interactively share and exchange data between each other and make it possible to have collaboration between independent Web components. Finally, the state-of-the-art solutions require a clear understanding on which messages should be routed to specific components and this knowledge is manually weaved into mashup business logic. The solution by Rainer liberates developers from taking care of this aspect – not only the messages are constructed such that target widgets can interpret them, but also the aggregation widget takes care of routing the messages to particular widgets.

Read more from Rainer Villido's master thesis on Semantic Integration Platform for Web Widgets' Communication.