Google gadgets now talk to each other: a GIANT step forward in the gadget revolution
As I have written before (here and here), I am a great believer in gadgets as THE application delivery mechanism of the (near) future. Google took a giant step forward to this future scenario by announcing “Gadget-to-Gadget Communication”. To quote:
“This allows multiple gadgets on the same page to send and receive data from each other. In other words, you can now build a gadget that communicates back and forth with one another. This introduces a brand new concept and strategy involved when writing gadgets. Information is no longer constrained to fit inside a single gadget. Instead, you can now split up various pieces of information amongst multiple gadgets and allow them to communicate with each other to paint a bigger picture. Gadgets now have the ability to be more closely integrated with one another and present a network of information to users. If users only care about one particular segment, they can simply remove or minimize any gadgets containing extraneous information that they don’t care about.
How does PubSub work?
PubSub is a new framework which allows ‘publisher’ gadgets on iGoogle to communicate changes to ’subscriber’ gadgets that have declared interest in those changes. This is currently available only on iGoogle and publisher/subscriber gadgets must be on the same page.”
This is phenomenal stuff and opens up a whole new realm of possibilities never available before.
Watch for some VERY cool applications from LimitNone that make use of this awesome capability!
