Perspectives for web applications and Z3ECM

In my last post, I was writing that Perspectives are, for me, maybe the most interesting feature (or, at least, one of them) of Eclipse RCP when building applications for users. Jean-Marc Orliaguet read it and got a new idea : might this concept work for web applications ?

Since it's Jean-Marc and that he likes to have ideas but prefer put them at work, he started to work on this concept and see how it could fit in the Z3ECM project (next-generation ECM platform, buit on top of Zope 3).

What for ?

Imagine that when writing a new component, you also can easily define perspective. Let's take an example : a blog application. Well you can define a "Blog Perspective" that would be activated when accessing to a blog and that would arrange the portal to offer a "blog view" putting portlets in right places. WIth this and the whole CPSSkins machinery, it would be very easy to define interfaces that can adapt to user's activity.
The same approach would also work for webmail, calendar, collaborative work, personal portal dashboard, etc. The application would then only define portlets and perspectives (no more pages, view, whatever :-).
From the user point of view, it would really improve the usability and how it the portal can adapt itself to his need. The user would also be albe to define its own perspectives (like it's dashboard) and switch between them.

It would be new approach in the design of web applications, that would allow to think them as user-oriented applications and not as a chains of html pages.

Can I see it ?

Of course you can ! :-) Jean-Marc already implemented a prototype then made a post on his blog and a flash demo.

"Jean-Marc rocks !"(tm) :-)

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