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Elements of the Mashup Ecosystem |
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Written by Webmaster
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Friday, 21 July 2006 |
My next five blog postings will be dedicated to the topic of roles associated with the mashup ecosystem. It is difficult to have such a discussion without understanding some of the components of the ecosystem as well. I will use this posting to describe the core components.
I will use some basic UML diagrams to help articulate my thoughts. As a disclaimer, I do not claim these diagrams to be exhaustive as I am sure they can be expanded in scope. My intention for including them is simply to help convey my message.
Almost a decade ago the modernization of enterprise applications from green screen to the web accounted for the bulk of many IT budgets. Typically, many IT organizations deployed mainframes or server farms to run a number of old, customized, yet still efficient business applications. These core business applications included the full gamut of internal systems necessary to run a business.
An early application of Web 1.0 technologies was that companies began to put new web-enabled facades onto their legacy applications. There was nothing inherently wrong with their business applications except that access was limited to rigid green screen interfaces. They began to realize the wealth of information that was hidden behind their legacy business applications. They also recognized that beyond the impractical costs of expanding the capabilities of the existing applications or undertaking complete redevelopment projects, there existed a gap in the skills necessary to understand the business logic that was embedded into their inventory of business applications.
As the modernization (or migration to the web) continued an immediate artifact was that information was gaining in value. Specifically, companies recognized the competitive edge that accurate, timely, and relevant information offered. For example, timely information could reduce decision making time. Savings in time and money through increased efficiency, improved productivity, and the rapid deployment of innovations could all result from the unleashing of the information assets of an enterprise.
Towards the close of the Web 1.0 era, the advent of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and web services brought immediate attention to the value of information and focused on the infrastructure necessary to integrate businesses and organizations with consumers, suppliers and partners.
|  Core Components of the Mashup Ecosystem | Now that the adoption of SOA is underway, the Web 2.0 era introduces us to a new kind of technology dilemma. The pendulum has swung from limited information access and availability to information overload. Technologies like Web Services, RSS, Atom, email and others, have placed the burden of information filtering on the everyday worker or decision maker. If these individuals are not enabled with the tools necessary to perform accurate and timely decisions then we will begin to deteriorate the value of information. I do not claim that the information overload factor is the sole motivator for mashups, but I do submit that it is one of the problems mashup can help solve.
My next series of postings will elaborate on five core components of the mashup ecosystem. The root component is Content. As you should now realize, information is the golden nugget of the Web 2.0 revolution. Data Service Interfaces are the programming interfaces necessary to integrate applications with content. This component represents the array of web services (WSDL, REST, etc) that are widely available on the web as information connectors. Widgets are software components that encapsulate one or more data services into a composite service with or without the compliment of presentation markup. These components can be considered the assembly blocks of mashups which are often realized as framework specific plugins. A Mashup Maker is an assembly environment for composing and running mashups. This ecosystem component is provisioned with collections of Widgets to enable the assemble of a variety of application domain specific mashups. A Mashup is the application artifact resulting from the assembly of information rich Widgets.
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 02 August 2006 )
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Roles 