Smith, whose formal title is vice president of emerging Internet technologies, said that mashups are a suitable alternative to more complex, transactional or business process integrations or orchestrations when you are trying to quickly blend content for business requirements likely to have a brief shelf life. Smith emphasized the content aspect.
According to Smith, IBM has been experimenting with Web 2.0 style development, mixing assets such as Wikis, Google Maps, or Flickr, for the past nine months. As we talked to customers, we found that there was a category of content-oriented applications bridging internal and external information that they would love to see built, noted Smith.
During his talk, Smith demonstrated a movie production dashboard based on the IBM’s Enterprise Mashup technology that was derived from a pilot project with the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB).
The live demo showed a film producer linking the entire post-production crew with a single application that tracked work progress and resources used, while providing the ability to allocate staff and budget going forward.
In another pilot, IBM recently put together an app for a large national home improvement retail chain to help factor weather reports with inventory management. For instance, if a Category 3 or higher hurricane is predicted, it makes sense to transfer inventories of plywood to stores in areas likely to be in the storm’s path.
Consequently, although a hurricane warning issued by the National Weather Service would not automatically trigger an inventory transfer through the SAP system, a regional manager with web access to the SAP inventory data could have display level integration populated by a severe weather advisory RSS feed.
The attraction of Web 2.0 mashups is that, like Ajax technology in general, they typically use scripting tools and utilities that web developers probably already have.
And unlike more formalized corporate apps, they shouldn’t take as much time to develop and may not require the same levels of skillsets. In many cases, a capable web developer could assemble a mashup in minutes.
And furthermore, the apps by nature are not intrusive because integration is literally only skin deep: URLs and other web objects are inserted on the web page rather than requiring interactions back in the middleware tier.
Using Ajax as the visual representation, I don’t have much logic there, said Smith. So the separation [between logic, data, and presentation] stays pretty intact.
Of course, the prime drawback of Ajax is that for now there aren’t any standard programming models. That’s why the OpenAjax organization was recently formed.
Compounding the challenge, while Ajax scripting languages like JavaScript or PHP might be object-based, they are not as robust as Java EE or .NET frameworks. Consequently, unlike Java EE or .NET, they don’t fully enforce rules regarding the lifecycle of objects or components.
And reflecting the immaturity of the market, Smith counts over 70 scripting tools that have varying degrees of functionality.
The way Smith describes enterprise mashups, they would seem to be quick, tactical applications that should be pretty disposable once the immediate need for them has passed.
If you’re a software veteran who recalls those 30-year old non-Y2K compliant legacy apps that lasted longer than expected, you might be tempted to just say no. But if you’re a web developer and there’s a critical business problem that needs to be solved quickly, your attitude is more likely to be, just do it.
