Recently efforts in software development have been directed toward building mash-up environments to address needs of users to have content/widgets from several sources of information. The widgets need to be interactive and customizable. The widgets usually have properties enabling user customization.
In most portals, dashboard, and mash-up environments, each widget has an associated properties page, which may also be referred to as an edit mode. Because the widgets originate from different sources, the edit modes of a respective widget usually appear differently (visually) and behave differently from an interaction point of view. Therefore, the behavior issue and appearance issue may cause an overall application look and feel to be inconsistent confusing average business users and increasing the slope of the learning curve.
Furthermore, in a dashboard and mash-up environment, typically two groups of properties are present. Properties specific to content provided by the sources of the widget form one group and properties related to widgets look and feel and interaction with the remaining widgets and environments provided by the application. In typical portal and dashboard environments, the two types of properties are usually separated, referenced by different names, and accessed from different places.