» A bumper crop of new mashup platforms | Enterprise Web 2.0 | Z. In today's mashup world, the apparent business potential of highly accessible and easy-to-use mashup creation tools like Yahoo! Pipes and Microsoft's PopFly is still undermined by their apparent lack of readiness for the enterprise. Mashups could theoretically allow business users to move -- when appropriate -- from their current so-called "end-user development tools" such as Microsoft Excel that are highly isolated and poorly integrated to much more deeply integrated models that are more Web-based and hence more open, collaborative, reusable, shareable, and in general make better use of existing sources of content and functionality. Remember, business workers still spend a significant amount of time manually integrating together the data in their ever increasing number of business applications.
So what's typically missing from today's mashup platforms to make them both useful and desirable in the enterprise? Are mashups really a major new development model? Seventeen Mashup Platforms. Toronto Taxi Fare Finder. Intel To Launch MashMaker. Systems - Downloads - Product Selection Page. Mashup Editor Tour. » Demo: BEA’s AquaLogic Pages and IBM’s QEDWiki to battle for co. All you need is a quick visit to John Musser's most excellent programmableweb.com or to one of the upcoming Mashup Camps (the next one is coming up in Silicon Valley in July, register here) to know that mashups are the hottest software development category going right now. Mashups, normally a kind of browser-based software that draws on multiple disparate Internet sources to arrive at some unique user experience, span the gamut from finding cheap gas (the data is superimposed on Google Maps) to discovering what local muscians are playing in your area and then sampling their music through downloadable MP3s (before wasting your money heading over the bar).
See podbop.org for what I'm talking about (podbop won the first place prize in the Best Mashup Contest at the first Mashup Camp in February 2006). Now, roughly a year after consumers and consumer-oriented developers started grokking the idea of mashups, big business are getting hip to the idea as well. Teqlo | The Enterprise Web 2.0 Blog: Faster, Better, Stronger. Web 3.0: When Web Sites Become Web Services. Today's Web has terabytes of information available to humans, but hidden from computers. It is a paradox that information is stuck inside HTML pages, formatted in esoteric ways that are difficult for machines to process.
The so called Web 3.0, which is likely to be a pre-cursor of the real semantic web, is going to change this. What we mean by 'Web 3.0' is that major web sites are going to be transformed into web services - and will effectively expose their information to the world. The transformation will happen in one of two ways. Some web sites will follow the example of Amazon, del.icio.us and Flickr and will offer their information via a REST API. Others will try to keep their information proprietary, but it will be opened via mashups created using services like Dapper, Teqlo and Yahoo! The Amazon E-Commerce API - open access to Amazon's catalog We have written here before about Amazon's visionary WebOS strategy. Why has Amazon offered this service completely free? Conclusion. HCI at Stanford University: Ubicomp Mashups. Source-code examples of APIs enable developers to quickly gain a gestalt understanding of a library's functionality, and they support organically creating applications by incrementally modifying a functional starting point.
As an increasing number of web sites provide APIs, significant latent value lies in connecting the complementary representations between site and service---in essence, enabling sites themselves to be the example corpus. We introduce d.mix, a tool for creating web mashups that leverages this site-to-service correspondence. With d.mix, users browse annotated web sites and select elements to sample. d.mix's sampling mechanism generates the underlying service calls that yield those elements. This code can be edited, executed, and shared in d.mix's wiki-based hosting environment. This sampling approach leverages pre-existing web sites as example sets and supports fluid composition and modification of examples. Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us.
ActiveGrid: How Mashups Complement SOAs - First Look - ebizQ. Web 2.0 Data mashups are to SOA what NASCAR is to automobile production -- a much faster, more free-flowing, results-oriented way of combining complementary components into new applications that have an advantage over traditional months-long application development or production cycles. And they seem to be rivaling NASCAR in popularity as large, medium and small software companies are all offering mashups. At the forefront of the movement is San Francisco-based software company ActiveGrid, which is offering free on-site "Build Days" to qualifying companies to deploy their mashups. "The key advantage is the speed to which business-driving applications can be delivered to the end user base within the organization," said Todd Hay, ActiveGrid's Vice President of Marketing and Business Development. "Their customers and their salespeople can get the information they need immediately instead of waiting for the long term, long-run enterprise integration technologies to finish.
" 039;s 2006 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle Highlights Key Techn. Egham, UK, August 9, 2006 View All Press Releases Web 2.0 technologies and business models dominate emerging technologies together with Real World Web and Applications Architecture Gartner, Inc., today announced its 2006 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle which assesses the maturity, impact and adoption speed of 36 key technologies and trends during the next ten years. This year’s hype cycle highlights three major themes that are experiencing significant activity and which include new or heavily hyped technologies, where organisations may be uncertain as to which will have most impact on their business. The three key technology themes identified by Gartner, and the corresponding technologies for enterprises to examine closely within them, are: 1. Web 2.0 Web 2.0 represents a broad collection of recent trends in Internet technologies and business models.
Ajax is also rated as high impact and capable of reaching maturity in less than two years. 2. 3. 2006 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 1. Web 2.0 Summit: Leading Players Facing Challenges, Push for Open. » Mashery brews service for managing APIs | Between the Lines | With APIs increasingly serving as a mechanism to enhance Web applications, Mashery has developed an on-demand service that provides management infrastructure and community building tools for API developers.
Mashery's beta service, launching this week, includes API access control, rate limiting, usage tracking and metrics, interactive documentation, developer key assurance and community development tools, such as blogs, documentation, forums, wikis and about pages. According to Oren Michels, CEO of Mashery, most developers publishing APIs are not focused on creating infrastructure around their exposed Web services.
Mashery isn't going to replace what the Web giants, such as Yahoo, EBay, Google and Amazon, have in place, but there are thousands of developers with APIs who don't want to build the infrastructure and tools required to deliver services and build developer communities. Mashery provide API reports with API and developer usage statistics. Eyespot. Blog Archive » Google Does The Mashup Dance. Long famous for allowing employees to spend 20% of their time on experimental work, Google is experimenting in public with a number of projects that give a nod to the mashup ethic. It was a very busy summer for Google; from their Google Apps for Your Domain launch to the partnership with Intuit to the acquisition of biometric company Neven Vision.
It doesn’t look like things are slowing down going into the Fall. Here’s an overview of some of the most recent offerings in the spirit of the mashup that the company has made available. Google Gadgets Set Free Formerly trapped largely in Google Desktop, more than 1200 Google Gadgets (widgets) were set free today for embedding in any web page.
The forthcoming issue of Time Magazine includes an interview with Google’s Marrissa Meyer, who says the company is building a multi-site search tool. SearchMash Google launched a new site this week with hardly a word of Google branding, called SearchMash.com. Ajax Search API 1.0. Blog Archive » Yahoo’s BBAuth Will Allow Better Mashups. Yahoo has released a new product called BBAuth just in time for its open HackDay today and tomorrow. It’s a mechanism for non-Yahoo applications to access Yahoo’s authentication mechanism and user data in a secure manner. Most mashups today do not access personal data because of the security issues (not to mention the fact that companies usually think of user data as proprietary).
The classic mashup example is mixing Google or Yahoo maps with other data. But there are far fewer examples of mashups involving user data protected from the rest of the Internet via a sign-in procedure. BBAuth fixes that problem when it comes to accessing data locked up at Yahoo. Using the tools Yahoo provides, non-Yahoo applications can request a user to sign in to Yahoo and give permission for Yahoo user data to be sent to the non-Yahoo application. Yahoo’er Dan Theurer explains how it works in more detail, and points to two test applications he created. There are two pieces to BBAuth. Mashup University on ZDNet.com. Assembling great software: A round-up of eight mashup tools. There is a frequently recurring piece of software development lore that plays on the fact that good programmers are supposed to be lazy. In these stories, a good programmer will take a frequently recurring, monotonous task (like testing) and instead of doing it by hand, will instead write a piece of code once that will do the task for them, thereby automating it for future use.
Put another way, instead of carrying out the work by hand, a lazy programmer will spend 95% of the time allotted to the work by developing code that will carry it out for them, and the last 5% of the time will be spent running it to get the actual work done. Then, every time the task must be carried out in the future, software can be directed to complete it swiftly and automatically. How many routine tasks could we get out of our way if we had powerful task automation tools that almost anyone could use? A round-up of eight promising mashup tools Will you consider using mashup tools to automate tasks in your work? Blog Archive » Create an API for any site with Dapper. A new service called Blotter from startup Dapper (dappit.com) is getting some good coverage around the blogosphere today.
Blotter graphs Technorati data for any blog over time. Most exciting to me though is Dapper’s basic service, just launched this week. The company says it’s effectively offering an easy way to create an API from any website. This might look like crass screen scraping on the surface, but the company aims to offer some legitimate, valuable services and set up a means to respect copyright. The site is clearly useful now. Dapper provides a point and click GUI to extract data from any web site that can then be worked with and displayed via XML, HTML, RSS, email alerts, Google Maps, Google Gadgets, a javascript image loop or JSON. Dapper is lead by Jon Aizen, a Cornel CS graduate who’s worked on the Alexa Archive and the Internet Archive and CEO Eran Shir. Here’s how it works. Enterprise mashups: More about processes and less about services.
A pair of excellently written and well-reasoned new posts over the last couple of days have focused on a key issue when weaving pre-existing services together into useful new business applications. The result of doing this is often called a composite application in the "enterprisey" world of service-oriented architecture (SOA). And it's called a mashup in the primarily consumer world of Web 2.0. Regardless of name however, both composite apps and mashups are intended to reduce the overall effort of development, improve functionality, promote data consistency, and increase the net output of useful software.
What's not to like about this? In this way, Web 2.0 and SOA often seem to be closely related in terms of connecting people and systems together more easily. And in reality, there is so much overlap in technology, technique, and intent that Web 2.0 and SOA has been described as a true coevolution of concepts. Enterprise Mashups Will Likely Be More Process-Focused. The quest for enterprise mashup tools | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDN. The recent round of discussion of enterprise mashups has been a good one, led primarily by a stellar write-up recently by Galen Gruman, and highlights a phenomenon that is nigh upon us. As part of tracking this, I've been spending the better part of the last couple of months searching high and low for good quality tools that let anyone build enterprise-quality mashups, and I can safely report here that there are only a few.
But why are enterprise mashups important? I've had discussions with a number of enterprise architects currently working in the industry about this and I do see a common theme in many of the IT requests they get these days. There seems to be considerable pent-up demand for smaller, custom applications in large numbers. The solution space around large enterprise apps is increasingly well-bounded; almost all enterprises today already have their mainline IT systems well developed and evolved. Where are all the good enterprise mashup tools? Not sure about any of this? Is IBM making enterprise mashups respectable? | Enterprise Web 2.
ZDNet blog colleague Joe McKendrick beat me to the punch earlier this week with an excellent analysis of the fascinating ramifications of IBM's recent statements at the New York PHP Conference aimed at mainstreaming mashups and Web 2.0 technologies. If IBM is getting seriously involved in this, there must be something to it, and certainly Rod Smith's comments are receiving considerable attention. Interestingly, most enterprises I talk to these days barely have mashups on their radar, yet I also continually hear from those same folks about how hard it is to create increasingly integrated business applications, as well as the slow pace of rolling out new functionality to users and customers. There indeed seems to be a rising corporate appetite for faster, more effective ways of building applications particularly when reusing existing IT software and information assets. One big difference? A question of what's being mashed up This leads us to a key definitional point.
The 5 styles of mashups. What Do You Need For A Great Mashup? at Like It Matters. Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Bastard apps. « People like old media | Main | MySpace exonerated » August 09, 2006 Duane Merrill provides a nice little introduction to mashups at IBM's site for developers. He looks at the origins of the concept in "bastard pop" songs, the common types of mashups that have popped up on the web and the technologies that underpin them. Most valuable, for those thinking about deploying mashups in a business context, is his overview of the technical and social challenges involved in constructing and using them. One of the technical challenges (which will be exceedingly familiar to corporate IT types) is data integration: Even in a Web 2.0 world, pulling together disparate data sources into a coherent whole is not a cinch. In short, the mixed and often uncertain parentage of these new "bastard apps" (my term, not his) is both their strength and their weakness.
UPDATE: Gartner takes a sunny view of corporate mashups. As I've said in a number of places before, the idea of an "enterprise mashup" is bunk. WubHub. Mapstraction - a javascript library to hide differences between. GopherNow! Top Ten Reasons Web 2.0 Technology will Rock the Enterprise. SIMILE | Timeline. Plan-as-you-go 'unconferences' unleash ideas. Creating my first Google map by hand. Whereami.at.
Making the Most of the Web: Creating Great Mashups. EarlyStageVC: So What Does Web 2.0 in the Enterprise Look Like? Mashups and SOBAs: Which is the Tail and Which is the Dog? Netpositive | Another definition for scrAPI. Netpositive | Here come the scrAPIs! When the worlds of SOA and Web 2.0 collide. » Popular elements of a 2006 web site or service | Web 2.0 Explo. Ning.
The Beer Hunter.