About a year ago I did not know what enterprise mashups mean and I asked a friend. He said that it is mixing and matching different applications. I wasn't impressed because we have all crossed EAI era, now in SOA era and what is this new mashup - sounded like mashing up flour and margarine for the doughnut mix.
Recently I noticed a site that listed enterprise mashup tools. Big companies like IBM and SAP have already released early adopter releases and everyone is catching up on the web 2.0 fever. I read through the tall claims by all these companies and to me it fitted my ideal app pretty well. I wanted a mashup (for now I suppose it can be a portal web based and hosted or a downloaded rich client since I saw both kinds of tools) that includes news from my favourite news sites, information about my projects from within the company intranet (note this), occasional cricket scores, some funny dilbert, yahoo mail and google mail, my company mail and calendar :-)
To me, all the above listed in one mashup will increase my productivity because I don't have to separately logon and browse different web sites.
One of the tools was actually designed to work across multiple data objects across Siebel, SAP etc coupled with web 2.0 sources such as RSS feeds, services based on REST, maps, charts...etc. I'm not an expert and hence I struggled to create my app across different enterprise systems and that too within a firewall. I could not readily see how the mashup tools handles authentication and authorization leave alone later pain points such as compatibility, performance etc.
Another tool I tried just did screen scraping or web scraping. I could mention any web site or any news feed and as long as the content was available, the tool just siphoned that info into a mashup and created a mashup portal for me (WSRP? I don't know).
But the Ajax or Aflax? options that these tools offer are so beautiful. Now these mashups mashing up needs minimal coding but overtime we will have drag and drop and wizard driven mashup tools that will resolve various security, interoperability, scalability issues in the background.
Guess what? For people like who are not serious developers and who just want to do new things using tools which are 'simple yet exciting' these kind of new concepts and new technologies are absolutely great. Mashup for timepass!
Friday, April 13, 2007
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