QEDWiki

I've been hearing a lot of buzz about QEDWiki, which is being developed at IBM. QEDWiki is a basically a wiki that can host simple web components. At first glance, QEDWiki looks like a typical portal, displaying aggregated information from around the web in widgets. Think dashboards like PageFlakes or My Yahoo.

I soon learned that QEDWiki is something completely different. My perception changed when I saw these widgets linked together, creating what IBM calls "situational applications". A "situational application" is a simple applications created on the fly using information provided through a web service.

These applications can be created by business users, for business users - without the support of a development team - very much like the advanced Excel applications created and shared today by business teams. I see something like QEDWiki taking the place of these apps with Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) playing the role of the Excel "sheets".

Because QEDWiki is build on a wiki framework, multiple users can collaborate and enhance individual pages - and even individual widgets. To facilitate sharing widgets, IBM has also developed Mashup Hub to categorize and store these reusable components.

I'm interested to see how this technology matures and if it's indeed leveraged by business users.

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