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Mashup alliance seeks universal language


By Jeff Feinman
September 25, 2009 — 
The world of mashups is a wide one with data coming from a seemingly infinite number of places, but the Open Mashup Alliance is looking to bring some order to all that complexity.

The Open Mashup Alliance, announced yesterday, will try to have a formal body standardize the Enterprise Mashup Markup Language (EMML).

EMML, which JackBe contributed to the public under the Creative Commons License, is an XML language. John Crupi, CTO of JackBe, called EMML a data-centric language that uses XPath and XQuery to filter and query data. It is a declarative language that has the ability to invoke heterogeneous services, including Java, REST, RSS and WSDL services.

“The goal of the alliance is to get the enterprise mashup market to move faster in driving adoption and interoperability around the language, and to be able to show the industry that this is a serious technology for the enterprise,” Crupi said. “The real effort here is to really foster and steward the language to the point where the alliance eventually contributes it to a formal standards body, such as W3C [World Wide Web Consortium] or OASIS.”

The alliance currently has 11 members. Those companies are Adobe, Bank of America, technology consulting firm Capgemini, Hewlett-Packard, consulting firm Hinchcliffe & Co., Intel, JackBe, mashup maker Kapow, ProgrammableWeb, financial consulting firm Synteractive, and financial market data company Xignite.

“We’re not pushing a particular proprietary platform, so the value to us is we’re investing in something that should be open and available to everyone,” said Tim Hall, director of SOA products at HP software and solutions. “What we’ve seen over the last few months in our relationship with JackBe is customers wanting to put a face on their headless services.”

One of the issues in creating a mashup standard is coming up with a cookie-cutter method of banding together data from the enormous amount of sources on the Internet. David Abramson, director of product management for LogiXML, a creator business intelligence mashups, said he thinks it will be challenging to find a mashup standard because of all the different ways data is used in mashups.

“Mashups focus on bringing a bunch of different data together, and that could be everything from data in a database, custom Web services, or tools like Salesforce.com or RSS feeds, and bringing that data together is hardly something that’s gonna be easily standardized,” Abramson said. “There’s so many diverse technologies out there, and everything’s a little bit different, so creating a wrapper around all that could in some ways compromise the performance of a mashup.”

However, Abramson said there are potential benefits to a mashup standard, such as the ability for companies that don’t have much mashup experience to leverage the language. He also noted that mashups already utilize many standards, including HTML and JavaScript.

HP’s Hall acknowledged that the amount of data sources for mashup creation does present a challenge to standardization. But he said HP’s focus is on enterprise mashups, so that doesn’t necessarily consist of mashing up every single service within an enterprise.

“I’m sure [human resources] would have a bit of a panic attack if someone was mashing the LDAP directory with Google Maps so people could see where you lived. That’s not a business purpose you want to enable,” Hall said. “So you want to be able to put restrictions and controls around what sources of information and content can be mashed.”

Membership in the Open Mashup Alliance is available to all organizations or individuals. The EMML specification, along with a runtime reference implementation, documentation and sample code, is available on the Alliance website at www.openmashup.org.


Related Search Term(s): mashups


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