Rod Smith, VP for Emerging Technologies at IBM

Mashups - Meet Enterprises

Abstract:
In this session, I discuss the evolution of the web application paradigm that is being fueled by the extreme popularity of blogs and wikis, creating new ways of interacting and truly enabling the read/write web. These technologies are evolving to enable the next wave of DIY-IT by combining the flexibility of user-oriented information architecture provided by active content (such as wikis) with that of content-in-flight (such as web services and RSS feeds) to provide an easy-to-use integration platform for creating a new style of content-centric applications, also manifesting themselves as mashups.

Characteristics of DIY-IT (mashups) include:

  • A collaborative environment to create, share, manage, and evolve content on your terms
  • Integration of new capabilities for publishing and handling content, targeting a less technically sophisticated user and broadening its reach to the entire web development skills continuum
  • A programming model that is activity/situational based, focused on accessing and aggregating valuable content with relatively little programming, providing immediate business value and feedback
  • An extensible development environment where the application serves as the toolbox
  • Built on the rich interaction model provided by AJAX, delivering a rich user experience via the browser

In general, application design is rebalancing the ratio of code to content using a variety of architectures, data formats, and feeds. Mashups enable end users to aggregate and filter disparate fragments of the evolving data platform more effectively than more traditional database-centric applications.