Dashboard is interesting as it seems like such a toy but can actually run almost anything behind the scenes, an example: I had created a service that used dist

Dashboard is interesting as it seems like such a toy but can actually run almost anything behind the scenes, an example: I had created a service that used distributed dashboard components to monitor mentions of you or your brand online. Each widget had a ruby script that ran behind the scenes to do the actual checking against various RSS sources (both for that user and others) creating a really sweet distributed system for the service.