business, solutions, Impact 

The World Wide Web has witnessed the spread of a new technological wave known as the widgets technology, which was adopted by large companies that have signific ant importance in the web market such as Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. Nowadays, the internet world is headed towards the concept of "widgetizing" the web conten t, which moves from the standard internet browsing through web sites, links, ema ils and chat, to a new concept of tiny shortcuts that display real-time informat ion from back-end systems and that target one specific application. Widgets can be embedded in a web page, or on a desktop environment or even on a mobile devic e. Widgets offer a promising potential due to their mobility and efficiency. Web widgets introduced a new concept of internet advertising moving from traditi onal banner ads and billboards to more exciting web content such as videos, adve rtisements, weather forecasts and so on, which is easily downloadable or even pa sted on users' blogs or personal web pages. Through widgets, web has become very dynamic, where any web page can become a point of sale, and ad-creators are no longer waiting for users to click on a link to buy something. Other forms of widgets are desktop widgets from which this work was inspired bas ed on famous widget desktop platforms such as Microsoft Vista sidebar, Google Ga dgets and Yahoo Widgets. However, this work added new flavor to the current wid gets concept available in the market, because it is targeted towards business ap plications in a corporate environment, thus easing accessibility of information, business to customer communication as well as business to business communicatio n with minimal cost, time and effort. Desktop widgets ease the distribution of w eb content by acting as shortcuts to web sites, databases or web services. The widgets implemented in this work rely on web services as the backend systems , thus making this work merge between two of the most recent web technologies: w idgets and web services. Web services presented a new internet era because they are based on standard technologies such as XML, SOAP, WSDL, UDDI and HTTP. This standardization makes them interoperable software entities that can be exchanged among systems with different operating systems and platforms. However, they pos e many challenges regarding security measures, ...  

xii, 63 leaves : ill. ; 30 cm.
 

Bibliography : leaves 61-63