eXo and Convertigo Accelerate Portal Development with Dynamic Widget Wiring

eXo customers can now ‘widgetize’ existing applications and wire them together for use in the eXo Platform, increasing developer productivity by up to 90 percent

Convertigo to commit widget wiring technology to GateIn portal project, co-led by eXo and Red Hat

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (April 12, 2011) – eXo, a provider of Java portal and user experience technologies, and Convertigo, maker of server technology to create composite applications and mashups, today announced a partnership to accelerate user-centric development with widgets and gadgets on eXo Platform. As part of this agreement, Convertigo will also be contributing its widget wiring technology to the GateIn project.

Today, portal developers have no easy way to create dynamic widgets or gadgets that can interact with each other, requiring instead time-consuming custom coding. In fact, if developers are using legacy assets, they often need to rewrite all the applications from scratch. The eXo-Convertigo partnership changes all this. eXo will integrate the Convertigo InteractionHub with eXo Platform, enabling eXo customers to easily ‘widgetize’ any application (legacy, modern or third-party), wire them together and put them to work in the eXo environment. The result is customized eXo-based dashboards and a richer user experience for customers — with up to 90 percent less development time and reduced project costs.

News Highlights

Convertigo’s non-intrusive integration capabilities enable developers to capture and expose business processes where they are, and then create, store and share reusable components as “wireable” widgets. As a result, creating dynamic composite applications for private and public clouds or mobile devices becomes much easier.

As part of the eXo-Convertigo agreement, Convertigo is contributing this widget wiring technology to the GateIn project co-led by eXo and Red Hat. GateIn is an open source portal project, created by the merger of eXo Portal and JBoss Portal in 2009. The Convertigo code donation will be integrated into the GateIn code base, which underpins eXo Platform and JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform.

eXo Platform is an integrated user experience platform (UXP) for building and deploying transactional websites, managing web and social content and creating gadgets and dashboards. It lets companies leverage their existing Java infrastructure, while accommodating changing user behavior driven by consumer web technologies such as social networks, social publishing, forums, etc.

Supporting Quotes

Benjamin Mestrallet, founder and CEO of eXo: “Convertigo is steps ahead of everyone else in the market in creating this very rich, dynamic widget-wiring technology for portal environments. Through this partnership, eXo is able to leap ahead as well, and offer our customers a truly amazing user experience. Our ability to integrate Convertigo is a testament to the extensibility and breadth of the eXo Platform.”

Olivier Picciotto, CEO of Convertigo: “We’re thrilled to partner with eXo on bringing our wiring technology to its portal solution. With eXo, we’ve found a partner as focused on delivering as great user experience as we are, and as committed to developing the most cutting-edge technology. It simply made sense to not only collaborate but to also contribute our software to the GateIn project.”

Jason Andersen, director of product marketing for JBoss at Red Hat: “Convertigo provides an elegant solution for widgetizing and wiring applications into the GateIn framework, which in turn simplifies our customers’ experience with JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform. With Convertigo’s contribution of this technology, GateIn becomes that much stronger of a portal foundation.”

Additional Online Resources

• Video of a sales dashboard built with Convertigo and eXo
• Step-by-step tutorial for adding Convertigo widgets to eXo Platform
• eXo blog post on “The Modern Enterprise Dashboard”
• Overview of eXo Platform 3.0
• Overview of Convertigo technology
• GateIn project

Brahim Jaouane

I am a Digital Marketing specialist specialized in SEO at eXo Platform. Passionate about new technologies and Digital Marketing. With 10 years' experience, I support companies in their digital communication strategies and implement the tools necessary for their success. My approach combines the use of different traffic acquisition levers and an optimization of the user experience to convert visitors into customers. After various digital experiences in communication agencies as well as in B2B company, I have a wide range of skills and I am able to manage the digital marketing strategy of small and medium-sized companies.