Of course, Google mashups are nothing new, but to develop them, you typically have to wade through lines of coding JavaScript and XML. WebAssist has introduced over a dozen controls for Google that are developed using wizards, rather than coding.
That is one of many extensions that it has developed for Adobe’s DreamWeaver web design tool (WebAssists’s founder is a former product manager for Adobe).
For instance, for the new Google checkout, WebAssist is one of the first to provide Add to Cart and Buy Now buttons.
While the buttons sound simple, Google’s use of Adwords makes the business logic relatively complex. Like any e-commerce site, sellers pay a merchant fee for each transaction that goes to the credit card company and the site itself. But in Google’s case, the use of Adwords means that the merchant in turn will get some revenue if buyers also happen to click on the word while on the site.
WebAssist has also developed similar wizards for adding controls to Google Maps mashups, as it has already with other e-commerce sites like eBay and PayPal.
The emergence of tools like WebAssist constitute yet another proof point that in many ways, Web 2.0 could easily be called Client/Server 2.0.
