Enterprise Mashups Get Caught in the Web 2.0 - Software Development Times On The Web

Enterprise Mashups Get Caught in the Web 2.0
By P. J. Connolly

January 15, 2007 — Outside the computing world, a “mashup” is a combination of two or more outwardly dissimilar audio or video tracks; think of The Clash’s “Rock the Casbah” mixed with Stevie Wonder’s “Uptight” as a surprisingly good example of the genre. But in the developer’s universe, a mashup combines Web services to create a more useful result: for example, mixing a Google search for movie theaters with a mapping tool to present data points, with driving directions to a theater and show times.

If this sounds a lot like the Semantic Web that Tim Berners-Lee postulated back in 1999, it should. Although the W3C might complain—in defense of its own Semantic Web project—it seems that mashup, programmable Web and semantic Web became interchangeable terms in 2006, as part of the ongoing “Web 2.0” hype.

“There are two different worlds talking about these things that are now colliding violently,” explained ZapThink senior analyst and principal Jason Bloomberg. “On the one hand, you have the whole Web 2.0 thing, which is consumer-oriented, it’s collaborative, it’s Web-based…. There are a few business models out there, but they’re mostly graphical and they mostly take advantage of mapping capabilities. The other world is the world of SOA,” he continued, where IT groups are “looking to build loosely coupled services that abstract various sorts of IT capabilities across the organization, with the purpose of composing these into a service-oriented business application [SOBA]. What’s happening in the SOBA world is that we’re shifting to a greater focus on the service consumer, which is now [a] piece of software.”

Perhaps one of the best “live” resources is ProgrammableWeb (www.programmableweb.com), which founder John Musser started in August 2005 out of what his blog calls “frustration” with the lack of an overall view of the Web-as-platform APIs. In recent weeks, the site has listed new APIs at an almost-daily rate, reaching 354 on Jan. 2. The library of mashups on ProgrammableWeb is even more extensive, totaling 1,410 as of the 2nd; a “Mashup Matrix” tracks the combinations of APIs and is updated daily.

Although discussions of the W3C’s Semantic Web project often go deeply into ontologies—the concepts and relationships that describe and represent an area of knowledge—and the use of the Resource Description Framework to model these relationships, there’s no formal requirement for either of these concepts in a mashup. In the cases of both the Semantic Web and a mashup, Uniform Resource Identifiers are used to define the relationships as well as their end points.

To date, many of the mashups one finds use the same model as the initial example: Take some data, add a map, and there’s the mashup. That’s due in part to the relative accessibility of high-quality maps online, thanks to Google, Yahoo and others, and the relative simplicity of displaying data against a map.

The combination of APIs, XML and good old-fashioned screen-scraping can become increasingly complex, but since many Web APIs attempt to be language-agnostic, developers can assume that their choice of tools is likely to be driven more by their own comfort level than by a tool’s compatibility with a given API.

But that’s just the beginning, compared with where some of the Internet’s big players want to go with the mashup model. Whether it’s Microsoft’s focus on communications (see “Microsoft Creates Sandbox for Telco Mashups,” above), or Sun’s blend of entertainment and news at The Big Mashup (www.sun.com/thebigmashup), it’s clear that the Web-as-a-platform is the next big thing.

But for it to be useful in the enterprise, it requires more than just APIs and XML, Bloomberg contends. “The overlap between the Web 2.0 world and the enterprise world is what we call the ‘enterprise mashup.’ What makes them ‘enterprise’ is that the services are loosely coupled; that is, they’re managed, they’re secure, there’s governance in place to deal with…the policies that apply to how organizations use services,” he said.

“Governance is really the key,” Bloomberg continued, “because no enterprise is just going to allow anyone to put any service they want together, however they like, the way you would with Google Maps. In the enterprise, services have sensitive information, and sensitive capabilities. You can’t just take the free-for-all… aspect of Web 2.0 and import it into the enterprise, without thinking through the whole governance question.”

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