Inter Widget Communication for iGoogle like portals

Question

I was looking for a platform where widgets developed using various technologies like Java can communicate with each other. In other words

When I add widgets to an interface I need them to talk to each other. For example A Click event in one widget should trigger an event in some other widget.

I have been looking into the web for solutions and ways to do it, but couldnt find anything concrete. Any pointers or information on this would be great. Something like this http://blogs.sun.com/pdblog/entry/inter_widget_communication_in_cross

Google also had a gadget to gadget communication API which was deprecated last year.

Answer 1

you could look into "postmessage", which is a communications API defined in html5 and supported in most browsers (IE8 included). for full cross-browser support (so including IE6/IE7) you could resort to the jquery postmessage plugin.

Answer 2

You should also check out the pmrpc library - http://code.google.com/p/pmrpc/. Pmrpc is a HTML5 JavaScript library for RPC-style (remote procedure call) inter-window, inter-widget and web workers communication. The implementation of pmrpc is based on the HTML5 postMessage APIs so communication can be cross-domain and is supported in most browsers.

In short, pmrpc enables you to have a method-call-like style of communication between browser widgets, e.g. Google Gadgets.