There is no doubt that JavaScript/XML gadgets make a great presentation layer over the web with increasing amount of data floating around. The ability of which these gadgets can be embedded in any place over the web, provides a great flexibility, and a wider reach. Google does this quite nicely with their iGoogle gadgets, enabling the gadgets to be embedded in almost any web page. The success of this great idea, would be only logical if all the data, services and mashups are also available over the web with open access or maybe authenticated access. This is where a cloud story fits-in, and this the very reason why Google can do it quite easily.
However, what if you want to do everything from the scratch and also provide a great presentation layer for the users. For an instance, lets say you have a lot of financial data within your enterprise, and you need to provide some of these to your customers, to general public and some for your employees. To do this, you will have to create appropriate data services, maybe mediate or transform some data, integrate with some legacy data sources, create some business work flows, mashup them with some 3rd party services like Google finance or charts and finally expose the end results to the targeted user group. This is where WSO2 Stratos PaaS comes for your rescue 🙂
If your requirements are such, you will need a strong middle-ware platform to full fill all the above tasks, and if its all on the cloud, you will not have to worry about anything other than writing your business logic. Once the business logic is correctly compiled, you can Mashup some of your data with external service APIs, and then write the presentation logic purely on javascript and xml as XML Gadgets and expose them to the users you need. Once the gadgets are published on WSO2 Cloud Gadget Server its just a matter of linking them up in any web page you want over the web.
https://gadget.cloud.wso2.com/ifr?container=default&mid=3&nocache=1&country=US&lang=en&view=default&parent=https%3A%2F%2Fgadget.cloud.wso2.com%2F&debug=1&up_=undefined&st=john.doe%3Ajohn.doe%3A10717%3Ashindig%3Ahttp%253A//gadget.cloud.wso2.com%253A80/registry/resource/_system/config/repository/gadget-server/gadgets/ngeo_vid.xml%3A0%3Adefault&url=http%3A%2F%2Fgadget.cloud.wso2.com%3A80%2Fregistry%2Fresource%2F_system%2Fconfig%2Frepository%2Fgadget-server%2Fgadgets%2Fngeo_vid.xml#rpctoken=1304649864https://gadget.cloud.wso2.com/ifr?container=default&mid=0&nocache=1&country=US&lang=en&view=default&parent=https%3A%2F%2Fgadget.cloud.wso2.com%2F&debug=1&up_=undefined&st=john.doe%3Ajohn.doe%3A10197%3Ashindig%3Ahttp%253A//gadget.cloud.wso2.com%253A80/registry/resource/_system/config/repository/gadget-server/gadgets/soa.xml%3A0%3Adefault&url=http%3A%2F%2Fgadget.cloud.wso2.com%3A80%2Fregistry%2Fresource%2F_system%2Fconfig%2Frepository%2Fgadget-server%2Fgadgets%2Fsoa.xml#rpctoken=1304649864
The above two gadgets are taken from WSO2 Cloud Gadget Server and have linked in to this blog, to convince about the great flexibility and reach it can add-up. You do not need to use the Cloud Gadget Portal as the only place for your data to be presented (Of cause if you are not using other gadget server specific privileges such as inter-gadget communication etc). You can simply use the Gadget Server as your own gadget repository, and encourage users to discover the gadgets and embed them into their own web pages over the web.
To sum up the story I would say, try-out Stratos, try out the available services and you will definitely find out more use cases, and creative ways to use the platform and leverage the advantages of the cloud
@nuwanbando 