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Glue and IE8

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Adaptive Blue recently released the Glue Toolbar for Internet Explorer 8.  Glue helps you discuss things you are interested in with your friends around the web; it connects conversations, recommend new books, music or movies to your friends…and reveal what things users are paying attention to as they browse the web.

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This is how Alex, one of the mind behind this very sophisticated architecture, commented the development of Glu:

“This is seriously, one of the most challenging projects in my 15 year software of software engineering. The good news is that resulting product is elegant, sharing 90% of common core code with 10% adapters for each platform. Yet more satisfying is the performance on IE8 is the same as on Firefox.” (Alex Iskold, AdaptiveBlue)

Here’s the steps to try out Glue:

  1. Install Internet Explorer 8
  2. Install Glue Toolbar for IE8
  3. Create an account
  4. Browse to your favorite site (for instance, www.amazon.com)
  5. You’re done! You can now view your friends suggestion, give your 2 cents tips, …

Ok, but how all this work? Alex has already written a few posts to go through the API, and I know is preparing an article to share his experience with this project. In the meantime, using the Developer Tools integrated in IE8, I did my homework :-)

When you visit a site, Glue append dynamically a small script to the page; you can see how this script asynchronously retrieve the complete Glue library, which is a proxy to the logic developed within the BHO component and the Glue web services. It’s a very clean approach, which allow AdaptiveBlue to extend any site without affecting the existing behaviors or functionalities.

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I find this toolbar very attractive, specially if you have hundreds of friends in your social networks :-)

The next step is probably to build an IE8 Accelerator or an IE8 Web Slice connected to Glue. Anyone from the community want to take the challenge?

Well done Adaptive Blue!

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    August 15, 2009
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    September 20, 2009
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