Troy Griffitts 9 Years Ago Fady, your blog post should be renamed: Why Not To Use Widgets. But really, you listed absolutely no positives for widgets. (and also iGoogle hasn't been around for over a year)Liferay's support for OpenSocial Gadgets allows a Widget to be dropped and organized on a page by a user in exactly the same manner as a portlet.Widget programming enables a wider range of developer. All web developers understand JavaScript-- not all web developers understand Java and JSR-286/168.Widgets are remoteable. i.e., I can use widgets from 5 different servers in my portal and don't need to install any software on my server.Widgets can still (and most all complex widgets do) use ajax to hit backend services which process data and hide business logic. These services are platform and programming language agnostic-- my python weenies can write in python if they desire.My Widgets can run in other containers besides Liferay (sorry guys.) This might not sound as attractive to someone already committed to Liferay, but it is a wonderful tagline when building a widget suite and gaining buy-in from other institutions to use your tools, "If you like Liferay as we recommend, fine, but if not, you can try any other portal which supports the OpenSocial specification." It makes your customer feel like they have options.Hope this gives a little more 'vs.' to your blog Please sign in to reply. Reply as... Cancel
Fady Hakim 9 Years Ago Hey Troy, thank you for your reply.For the title, I believe you are right . Actually I don't believe that Widgets are mature enough now to compete against portlets specially for enterprise application level. Widgets can do the job for small application on a small environment with no high security requirements but when it comes to high transactional serious enterprise level application, I don't think Widgets is a good choice.Regarding your point about " All web developers understand JavaScript-- not all web developers understand Java and JSR-286/168." it's always depend on what layer of development you are talking about. backend developers are all about java, spring, struts...web designer are the one who like javascripts. Ofcourse it's a great way to do your interface with less calls to the server but for every javascript line you add on your page, you pay more for the testing process among different browsers, more processing on the browser side (sometimes that's not good because some clients have very old computers and their browsers hang when they access any page with lot of javascripts...)...more time to load the page for 1st time and more code to expose to the public. Also think about a big enterprise who have developers who want to use Javascripts to build their portlets and another who want to use JSF or JSP tags with springs or struts on the backend, with widgets you can't do that, you are stuck with only javascript. With portlets, you are free to choose which framework you want to use. I did before some portlets using angularJS and moreover, you have a standard way to make portlets that use different frameworks to communication on your page.Regarding "Widgets are remoteable. i.e., I can use widgets from 5 different servers in my portal and don't need to install any software on my server." portlets can work remote too. WSRP protocol can support a secure communication to consume portlets on a portal from a remote servers. If anyone have a heavy processing portlet, we always recommend to add this portlet on a different server and use WSRP to consume it on the portal.For the last point, Liferay always gives the freedom of development to their clients, we don't lock our clients to any technology. you don't need to learn any new development framework to develop any application, you can use any standard J2EE framework (spring, struts, JSF, JSP, or any javascript framework like AngularJS...).if our clients still believe that widgets is better for them, they can always use OpenSocial Gadgets with liferay: https://www.liferay.com/documentation/liferay-portal/6.2/development/-/ai/creating-and-integrating-with-opensocial-liferay-portal-6-2-dev-guide-08-enMoreover, we never lock our clients to any application server, web server, database... we support wide range of infrastructure to integrate easily in our client environment. https://www.liferay.com/documents/14/21598941/Liferay+Support+Matrix+6.2.pdf/f2f587a4-73e1-4b69-b8cd-4badc4f32e95Thanks Please sign in to reply. Reply as... Cancel