IBM Business Monitor, V8.0.1 > Reference > Developing for Monitor dashboard spaces

Overview of widgets

A widget is an application or dynamic content that can be placed into a page in a Monitor dashboard space.

This overview provides high-level conceptual information and links to information about how to create widgets and about the widgets that come with IBM Business Monitor. The following sections explain why and how you would create your widgets and provides references to APIs that you could use in creating your own widgets.

What is a widget?

A widget uses the iWidget specification 2.1 for its definition and often contains many different UI elements such as labels, lists, trees, and buttons.

See Anatomy of a widget for information on the files required by a widget.

Why develop a widget?

You might want to develop your own widgets for the following reasons:

• You want widgets that perform functions that are available in the IBM products that your company has installed. You can create widgets to add functions that are unique to your business environment.

• You need complete control over what information a given widget presents to the user.

How do widgets communicate?

Widgets use REST APIs to communicate with the server to access server-side functionality. Widgets provided by these products communicate with the product server using these REST APIs. When you create custom widgets, you can use these REST APIs or you can use other communication mechanisms such as a servlet that calls an EJB bean to talk to a server component if it is supported by the operating environment.

Widgets use events to communicate with other widgets on the page. When a user clicks a button or selects something in the widget, or a widget receives an information update from a server, the widget can fire an event to inform other widgets on the page. The widgets that receive the event can respond in some way.

For example, the responding widget can update to display information based on the information being displayed by the firing widget, or it can communicate with a server, or it can fire its own event.

Conceptually, you can see communication between widgets as wires. If you log into the Monitor dashboard as an editor of a space and select to edit the wiring of one of its pages, you can see the wires between the widgets. These wires connect an event sent by the source widget with an event handled by the target widget. If you are creating a set of widgets designed to communicate with each other, you must consider the wiring between the widgets.

What knowledge and skills do I need?

To develop a widget, it helps to have skills in the following areas:

• Dojo 1.7.3
• Extensible Markup Language (XML)
• HyperText Markup Language (HTML)
• iWidget specification
• Java™ 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE)
• JavaScript
• Representational State Transfer (REST)

• Anatomy of a widget
  A widget uses a number of different files.
• Environment for developing a widget
  To develop widgets, you need an environment for coding, running, testing, and viewing them.
• Widget attribute layers
  IBM Business Monitor uses layers of attributes to provide superusers, editors, and users with the ability to customize what information a widget displays along with how the widget displays that information.

Developing for Monitor dashboard spaces

Related tasks:
Create widgets