Scrolling Twitter Gadget in Oracle WebCenter in Less than 2 Minutes

In a previous post we saw how to build a twitter portlet using the Fusion Middleware stack in a few minutes. If you’re more on a quick prototyping or proof of concept project, you can do something similar or even more visual without any coding whatsoever. Twitter has a set of gadgets that you can integrate into your Web site. Here are the more-or-less trivial steps:

1. Find the gadget you want to use: http://twitter.com/about/resources/widgets
   For example, if it’s the search widget, you can customize it by specifying the Search Query, the Title, and the Caption. 

   
   When done, click the Finish and Grab Code button and copy the source provided.

2. Create a WebCenter page.
3. Drop an HTML Markup component on the page and specify the Value field by pasting the code you copied to the clipboard above. The parameters are self-explanatory, modifying them is very straight-forward.
4. Save your changes, and return to your page. Here is what my scrolling Twitter gadget looks like.

ADF and WebCenter Mashup: Publishing Google Gadgets with Ensemble

With Tom Quigley we just published a new demo showcasing what it takes to publish ADF or WebCenter applications as Google Gadgets. The demo walks you through the simple steps of building an ADF application, exposing it as a Google Gadget with Ensemble, and consuming the gadget in iGoogle.

Google Gadget with Parameters

Portlets being one if not the most important reusable web components in the enterprise portal world, gadgets, widgets, mashlets, and alike rule the consumer web. In this screen cast I give a quick demonstration how you can integrate the two worlds.

The example takes a classic example, a google map gadget, shows how to add it to your page with the help of OmniPortlet. More importantly, it demonstrates how to parameterize the gadget, that is how to make the gadget display a map, defined by the parameter (zip code, city name, etc.) that is passed to it.

Combining this capability with inter-component communication techniques, you can build very powerful, compelling mash-ups.