Enterprise mashups allow users to combine data and applications from disparate sources into new services. Our new Enterprise Mashups Tutorial provides the definitions, tips, examples and strategies you need to benefit from this valuable technology.
Contents
Introduction
What is an enterprise mashup?
Enterprise mashup tips and expert advice
Enterprise mashup best practices
Enterprise mashup implementation examples
Enterprise mashup tools and products
Introduction
An enterprise mashup combines applications and/or data from disparate sources into a new service. They are most often created using Ajax techniques or with available mashup servers. By bringing together information and features once independent of one another, mashups have simplified many tasks. A common example is a mashup that combines apartment ads on Craigslist with Google maps, allowing a user to view the location of each advertised apartment without having to search for it himself.
To make such a mashup, a programmer would need access to the Craigslist and Google Maps APIs, and these are accessible, along with many other publicly available APIs, from sites across the Web. The enterprise may get the most out of mashups, though, by using them to integrate private data and applications. Michael Ogrinz, author of Mashup Patterns, says in a recent podcast that mashups can address business specific problems once thought to be complicated and expensive to fix because they can bypass the need for source code and original programmers. Instead, a mashup can harvest and combine data from different places into a new service.
The relative ease of creating mashups drives their popularity. In a recent article on how mashups bring IT and LOB together, Clay Richardson, senior analyst of business process management at Forrester Research, said, "Mashups are a way to quickly build processes. People want to roll things out in weeks instead of months." Richardson cited cost savings as a reason to create processes quickly.
Ease of creation also means that mashups can be made outside of the IT department. Angel Diaz, director of IBM WebSphere BPM and connectivity, said in the article referenced above that, "In the old days, if the business 'guys' wanted to change the color of something, they'd have to go to IT. Now, they can do that type of thing themselves." With the use of available mashup tools, such as WSO2's new mashup wizard, users do not need significant development expertise to create a problem solving application.
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What is an enterprise mashup?
Enterprise mashup
A mashup is a Web page or application that integrates complementary elements from two or more sources. Mashups are often created by using a development approach called Ajax , though other methods exist and are popular. Mashups are frequently used to access disparate data sets.
Ajax
Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a method of building interactive applications for the Web that process user requests immediately.
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Enterprise mashup tips and expert advice
Podcast: Enterprise mashups with John Crupi
Enterprise mashups are like portals…then again they are not. The mashup so closely associated with the Ajax movement is getting a new look in, what is for some, a new role. That is as a way to shine-up established legacy applications. John Crupi describes that role in this podcast.
What are chief criteria for analyzing enterprise mashups?
What are chief criteria for analyzing enterprise mashups, especially in relation to a "mainframe wrappering" project? Jason Bloomberg has the answer.
Creating User-Defined Mashups
This chapter, excerpted from "Oracle Database Ajax and PHP Web Application Development," discusses how to personally customize your applications using mashups.
Enterprise mashup patterns act as API enablers
In his recent book Mashup Patterns, author Michael Ogrinz indicates that "screen scraping" in the PC terminal era gave a bad name to any method to extract raw data from a user interface. This is just one hurdle that champions of mashups may face in the enterprise.
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Enterprise mashup best practices
Enterprise mashups: Tools build data integrations
Vendors variously focus on BPM-oriented mashups, data-oriented mashups and vivid front-end data visualization visualization. Of wide interest at the moment for the mashup crew are business intelligence apps, where diverse data sources are tolled up to provide a useful analytical view of the corporation. Forrester Research's James Kobielus, analyst, laid out a range of enterprise mashup types for BI. Read them in this article.
Enterprise mashup patterns can make data integration easier (Podcast)
Michael Ogrinz, author of Mashup Patterns: Designs and Examples for the Modern Enterprise, spoke with SearchSOA.com editor Jack Vaughan about the current environment for mashup development and discussed in detail the capabilities enterprise mashups can provide for the enterprise.
In search of enterprise mashup standards
The diversity found in enterprise mashup approaches has pros and cons: it spurs innovation but also proliferates multiple system types. Even as analysts recognize mashups as one of the top technologies of 2009, they admit the variety plays against standardization.
Enterprise mashups, SOA's killer app?
As users move forward with the diligent work of SOA, enterprise mashups are emerging as an eye-popping new application that's getting the attention of the business unit. For some, mashups are seen as an easily created revenue stream.
Balancing repeatability and situationality with process mashups
Putting mashup capabilities in the hands of a business user means empowering that user to create the application as they use it. Sounds good, but how often does IT really want users of applications to be responsible for creating and modifying those applications as well?
Enterprise mashups bring IT, LOB collaboration to BPM
Increasingly, multiple applications are combined using enterprise mashup tools with the goal of streamlining Business Processes Management (BPM). At times, these tools and processes have blurred the once well defined line between application development and the line-of-business (LOB).
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Enterprise mashup implementation examples
Enterprise mashup user story: Knowing your data
Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has been using SOA and mashups to help bring products to market since about 2005. Research Fellow Michael Linhares said the company configures its own mashups and wouldn't have it any other way.
NEC and SAIC use SOA for first-responder app
Todd Landry, senior vice president of NEC Sphere, said SAIC and NEC Sphere have developed mobile collaboration technology – in effect, a SOA-RIA-Web Services-IP Telephony mashup – that will be useful to first responders, law enforcement, and others.
User combines open source ESB with data services to speed customer reports
Read how and why the SOA team at Concur, a provider of an on-demand employee expense reporting system for corporate customers, built data services mashups that allow end users ranging from the executive level to operational support people to view information that was almost inaccessible to them.
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Enterprise mashup tools and products
Data services mashup wizard latest for SOA
Wizard technology for mashing up data services can help enterprise database administrators, as well as a new generation of 'mashup authors,' WSO2 director shows.
EGL can simplify application modernization, development, for Web 2.0 (Book excerpt)
This free book excerpt is from Enterprise Web 2.0 with EGL, by Ben Margolis. Read this excerpt to understand the scope of EGL, including how it can help to create enterprise mashups.
Get a grip on JavaFX 1.2 for Rich Internet Applications
JavaFX provides specific classes for interpreting events from an XML pull parser in terms of the RSS or ATOM standard information components. These classes make it easy to create mashup style applications which gather information from all over the Web.
Kapow bows data-driven server for the enterprise
Kapow technologies released a version of its flagship server. This can be viewed as a nod to the increasing importance data integration has taken in an "enterprise mashup space" that has, in Kapow's view, evolved to include SOA, BI/Web Intelligence, content migration and portal generation capabilities.
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