The technology involved, called QEDWiki (the QED stands for quick and easy done), includes the core document collaborative authoring and displaying function of a Wiki with a persistence and file attachment mechanism. IBM took an open-source Wiki and added widgets for information sharing, and a user interface supporting drag and drop mashup capabilities.
It’s also one of the early pieces of content distributed by alphaWorks, not as the usual download, but through a multi-tenant, on demand (hosted) model.
According to David Boloker, CTO of the company’s emerging Internet technology software group, and IBM’s resident Ajax guru, on demand seemed the right channel given that mashups are a highly distributed integration approaches themselves. And it satisfied clients that wanted to keep things non-intrusive.
Over the past six to eight months, IBM piloted QEDWiki and, in December, announced a collaboration with AccuWeather that could enable clients to quickly integrate weather feeds into their applications using simple drag-and-drop techniques, rather than raw coding.
For instance, the AccuWeather QEDWiki could enable a retail chain logistics planner to predict demand for seasonal items. It could use long-term weather forecasts to stage distribution of items with a mashup atop the warehouse management system. So if the western states are more likely to see a severe winter, snow shovels and snow blowers might be warehoused near Denver rather than near Boston. And if short-term Doppler Radar shows a blizzard hitting Salt Lake City, it could be mashed up with a GIS systems that could show the fastest routes to rush the inventory to places in the projected path of the storm.
Release of QEDWiki is one of the first pieces to fall in place after IBM began talking up the idea of enterprise mashups last year.
Until now, mashups have been largely informal, opportunistic affairs, providing quick ways to unite multiple pieces of web content onto Ajax-style, rich web clients. Reflecting the fact that mashups have largely emerged from Ajax style programming, which relies heavily on loosely structured scripting languages like Java Script, programming styles and practices are highly informal and all over the map.
Last June, IBM’s resident emerging technology executive, Rod Smith, demonstrated a movie production dashboard from a pilot project produced for the National Association of Broadcasters in the US. It showed a film producer linking the entire post-production crew with a single application tracking work progress and resources consumed, as a tool to help allocate staffing.
Of course, mashups are only one of many routes to integrating information or processes from multiple sources. You could have classic systems integration, which requires significant time and resource, and is highly brittle. Or you could have a portals built on elaborate Java EE or Microsoft .NET technologies that are platform specific; composite or orchestrated services or applications composed on web services that are cross platform; or mashups, which rely on simpler JavaScript, and more recently, GUI tooling that is much less code intensive.
According to Boloker, mashups are best if you’re only going to use the assembled apps or processes only a handful of times, whereas if you are looking for more permanent integration, or looking to automate a highly repetitive task or process, composing or orchestrating services is a more maintainable solution.
Although mashups are designed to be more temporary, they don’t necessarily have to be tiny applications or work with modest amounts of data. For instance, IBM is working with several Hollywood companies looking at mashing up streaming video clips with secondary audio and text. And it’s working with several universities that may mashup large streams of scientific lab data as well.
According to Boloker, the idea of releasing QEDWiki is to see just how organizations would actually use it, and especially, if it graduates to business-critical applications.
