Mashup enabler

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Contents 1 Mashup enabler 2 History 3 Internal resources 4 Services as well as data 5 Web resources 6 External links

[edit] Mashup enabler

In technology, a mashup enabler is a tool for transforming incompatible IT resources into a form that allows them to be easily combined, in order to create a mashup. Mashup enablers allow powerful techniques and tools (such as mashup platforms) for combining data and services to be applied to new kinds of resources. An example of a mashup enabler is a tool for creating an RSS feed (which can easily be used to create a mashup using a tool like Yahoo! Pipes) from a spreadsheet (which cannot easily be used to create a mashup).

Mashup enablers have also been described as "the service and tool providers, that make mashups possible".

[edit] History

Early mashups were developed manually by enthusiastic programmers. However, as mashups became more popular, companies began creating platforms for building mashups, which allow designers to visually construct mashups by connecting together mashup components. Some examples include Yahoo! Pipes, IBM’s QEDWiki, and Microsoft’s Popfly.

Mashup platforms--also called mashup editors--have greatly simplified the creation of mashups, significantly increasing the productivity of mashup developers and even opening mashup development to end-users and non-IT experts. Standard components and connectors enable designers to combine mashup resources in all sorts of complex ways with ease. Mashup platforms, however, have done little to broaden the scope of resources accessible by mashups and have not freed mashups from their reliance on well-structured data and open libraries (RSS feeds and public APIs).

Mashup enablers evolved to address this problem, providing the ability to convert other kinds of data and services into mashable resources.

[edit] Internal resources

Stimulated by the emergence of Web 2.0, mashup platforms were designed with external, publicly accessible resources in mind. As such, their design patterns rely on structured input data in XML-like formats such as RSS. As businesses began adopting mashups, there evolved a growing interest in accessing internal enterprise data from sources such as databases and proprietary desktop applications.

Mashup enablers approach this problem by creating “wrappers” that take information in some non-standard format and convert it into mashup-friendly XML. RSSBus Feed Server, for example, provides hundreds of man-made connectors for various desktop applications allowing dynamic XML feeds to be created from databases, spreadsheets, directories and myriad other sources.

[edit] Services as well as data

In order to be useful, mashups need to be able to push data and manipulate their underlying resources, as well as simply pulling data from them. An emerging mashup-friendly standard for providing programmatic access to software services is REST. Mashup enablers such as RSSBus provide RESTful access to desktop applications, meaning mashups can carry out complex tasks such as composing emails in Outlook or creating files on the local hard drive.

[edit] Web resources

Of course, not all valuable business data is located within the enterprise. In fact, the most valuable information for business intelligence and decision support is external to the organisation. With the emergence of rich internet applications and online web portals, a huge number of business-critical processes (such as ordering) are becoming available online. Unfortunately, very few of these data sources syndicate content in RSS format and very few of these services provide publicly accessible APIs.

Mashup enablers are helping to bridge this gap. Tools like Kapow RoboMaker and web-based Dapper enable wrappers to be created for all kinds of web sites, meaning data can be harvested from web sites and converted to XML. More advanced tools like EasyWrap Mashup Studio automate the creation of web wrappers and even allow the creation of RESTful APIs for accessing web sites programmatically.

[edit] External links

QEDWiki Making Money in the Mashup Economy Kapow RoboMaker Dapper

[[:Category:Web 2.0 | World Wide Web | Software architecture | Web applications | Web development]] Cadwellian (talk) 17:09, 13 May 2008 (UTC)