Taolin is an open source Web desktop created at the research institute Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK).
The web desktop consists of a personal dashboard customisable by adding micro-applications called widgets. Each widget offers a different service that can be provided as a view over internal services or repositories (e.g. access to papers repository) or as a communication service (e.g. jabber web chat) or as an external resource (e.g. Google search).
Taolin relies on a 3-tier architecture: the back-end has been developed using CakePHP (a Model-View-Controller framework) over a PostgreSQL database (chosen for its stability and reliability), while the front-end takes advantage of the usage of JavaScript and AJAX (the framework adopted for the development is ExtJS, integrated with jQuery). JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, a lightweight data-intercha