Web Development Live

Announced IBM Mashup Center will be hosted as a free trial on the Web with which non-technical business people can use to experiment and build customized mashups following the success of early corporate adopters Boeing Corporation (NYSE: BA) and Carrefour Group (PARIS: CA).

On schedule for mid-year delivery, the IBM Mashup Center allows business people to create situational applications, or mashups, by remixing information from anywhere to gain business insight and do their jobs smarter and more effectively. Using IBM’s mashup technology, even non-technical users will be able to exploit standards and Web-based technology to gain access to myriad information, such as Web sites and feeds, spreadsheets, databases, applications, unstructured text from an email, video, audio and other information on the Web, and make sense of it all in minutes.

In the coming weeks, IBM will offer customers the opportunity to experiment with IBM Mashup Center and gain hands on experience for free through IBM Lotus Greenhouse. Lotus Greenhouse is a Web site where anyone can register and try out IBM Mashup Center, and many other collaborative products, such as IBM Lotus Connections, Lotus Quickr, Lotus Sametime and WebSphere Portal. IBM Mashup Center will be hosted on Greenhouse, giving customers a safe environment to try the technology and evaluate mashup potential without installing anything in their own environment. The hosted version of IBM Mashup Center will include widgets from IBM, and a growing network of IBM Mashup Center Business Partners, like StrikeIron and Kapow Technologies.

This comes at a time in which innovative companies of every size are beginning to realize the possibilities of Web 2.0, but require security, management and governance capabilities to responsibly take advantage of these possibilities. IBM Mashup Center gives users the freedom to create new, light weight applications on the fly and get customized views of disparate information, but with the stability corporations require. IBM’s deep history in open standards, information integration and emerging Internet technologies, make the company an undeniably strong partner in a new technology era.

“As an established innovator, Boeing believes in the power of Web 2.0 and embraces it not only for collaborative work, but also for the heavy lifting of enterprise planning and execution,” said Paul Comitz, Program Manager, NEO Demonstration, Boeing Corp. “The IBM Mashup Center is playing a key role in our visionary approach to strategic asset management. It’s critical to know where your major assets are and how to use them at any given time, situation or condition.”

IBM Mashup Center breaks new ground in ease of use and speed at which business users can solve everyday business problems in any size enterprise. It includes an intuitive browser based tool to easily assemble of new mashups, thus allowing non technical users anyone in a business to literally drag and drop mashup components from personal, enterprise and Web sources to easily create, deploy and share customized Web applications in minutes.

This upcoming offering includes a set of out of the box, business ready widgets, as well as a catalog for finding and sharing widgets and mashups. To create new widgets, IBM Mashup Center includes an easy-to-use development environment to construct new widgets from enterprise systems and the Web. Users can also take advantage of built-in Web 2.0 community features like ratings, tagging and commenting to guide users the to the most valuable and useful widgets.

IBM Mashup Center also provides extensive and powerful capabilities for managing information feeds from enterprise sources. Information from a wide variety of sources can be mixed, filtered and mashed together to create new information sources and output in many different forms, such as RSS, ATOM or XML. With the ability to merge, transform, filter, annotate or publish information in new formats, IBM Mashup Center helps create a single view of disparate sets of information in a highly re-usable manner. Feeds are an easy way to service-enable systems that do not natively provide RESTful interfaces, and thus provide an on-ramp for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

As enterprise mashups continue to climb in popularity and deliver more value for business, IBM is working with an ecosystem of Business Partners to help customers get the most out of situational applications. IBM Business Partners such as Jibes, JustSystems, Kapow Technologies and StrikeIron are introducing solutions that, when combined with IBM Mashup Center, enable rapid access to information and new and compelling uses for new types of data.

For example, IBM Mashup Center users can easily connect to data in the StrikeIron Web Services Marketplace to reduce the complexity for developers or business users who want to integrate live data from a number of sources. In addition, by connecting to StrikeIron’s Lite services, users can create demos to show how easily live data can be integrated with a mashup to create powerful Web applications without having to register or purchase the service.

Jibes demonstrates the business value of mashups in the enterprise market by providing industry-specific information fabrics for the semi-conductor, airline and media industries on top of IBM Mashup Center. JustSystems provides a rich presentation layer for information accessed by IBM Mashup Center, allowing users to interact with dynamic, or living, documents that combine static and dynamic information. Together, this enables new uses for enterprise mashups such as the sharing of design and development information across collaborative research, or for use by development teams for reconciling supply and demand among trading partners.

An on-premise version of IBM Mashup Center is expected to be delivered mid-year, and pricing details will be made public at that time.

Tags: adopters, amp, boeing corporation, business insight, business users, center business, collaborative products, developers, fi, gain hands, governance, growin, hands on experience, innovative companies, job, kapow technologies, lotus connections, lotus sametime, lte, mash, mashup, nyse, paris ca, rapid access, technical business, technical users, trial on the web, unstructured text, web applications, websphere portal, widgets

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If there is a clear trend at this show it is that the Web 2.0 is no longer about social networking, SaaS, Web communities, or rich internet applications, it’s about moving as many of the core business processes as you can to the platform of the Web. Or, perhaps better put: Web-enabled process outsourcing.

You only need to consider the number of products that are now moving way beyond SaaS, to application development, storage, interface design, and middleware…all delivered as a service over the Web. Indeed, there is not much you can’t do with the Web-born tools around today, inclusive of the new Google App Engine on-demand application development platform product just released. So, the trend is re-hosting of core enterprise applications, business processes, information, and much of the enterprise architecture we see today, so they are much more efficient, agile, and cost effective…in essence living up to the core objectives of SOA.

This week, at the show, Bungee Labs launches their platform-as-a-service offering providing application development capabilities and core connection service with Web-delivered resources and APIs. This is on top of the platform capabilities already available with Amazon and Salesforce.com.

Also, StrikeIron announced an on-demand Web services-enablement platform called IronCloud. Building on existing Web service marketplace capabilities, IronCloud streamlines the process of on-ramping enterprise data to the Web, using an on-demand platform that makes enterprise information available as managed and secure Web service APIs. In essence, providing a cost effective way of making critical business data available for mashups, SaaS, or other Web-born computing applications, including the emerging platforms I just mentioned.

So, let’s see. Now you can design, build, deploy, and test applications completely using on-demand platforms delivered over the Web. You can access information on-demand, and now you can even share your core enterprise data on-demand.

This goes to the whole WOA banter that’s been a large part of the SOA blogosphere for the last few weeks. We are now finding it easier and more cost effective to place much of our core business processes out on the Web, where there are many resources, information, and tools all available as a service, either free or at a low cost. Thus, you can get up-and-running faster, create automation solutions that are much more cost effective, and meet the needs of your business better than you could in the past. It’s a paradigm shift that’s hard to ignore.

Tags: amazon, amp, application development, fi, google, mash, mashup, objective, salesforce, social networking

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The 2008 Horizon Report, compiled by US thinktanks the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative, was released as part of Educause’s annual conference and identified six technologies likely to affect learning institutions over the next two to five years, including mobile broadband, data mashups, collective intelligence and the social operating system.

“The next generation of social-networking systems ?social operating systems ?will change the way we search for, work with and understand information, by placing people at the centre of the network,” stated the report.

“This seemingly subtle change ?from an emphasis on file-sharing to one on relationships ?will have a profound impact on the way we will work, play, create and interact online,” the report claimed.

According to the report’s authors, the central tenet of the social operating system is that it collates existing information from a user’s “social graph” ?assorted information on an individual’s social and professional interactions embedded across the web ?to “connect the dots” between individuals, content and contacts.

Tags: fi, mash, mashup

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Accenture’s head of research and development, Martin Illsley, on Monday advised businesses that mashups, web applications combined with more traditional business software, were becoming increasingly useful but have to be managed so as not to overwhelm IT departments.

“Systems can be integrated in a lightweight manner,” said Illsley. “But mashups and the like have to be managed very well or they drift out of the IT department into many departments. Most IT departments are aware of that and spend an awful lot of time trying to keep things together.”

While there are tangible business benefits to allowing employees to create their own combinations of applications, Illsley said,there has to be a balance between “stifling the process by making it go through 20 stages” and loss of control of the application.

“Today, if you want to build integrated back-end and front-end systems, you use technologies like Google Maps with lightweight APIs [application programming interfaces], whereas you used to buy several packages and integrate them into a framework,” said Illsley. “These days organisations can throw applications together quite quickly.”

Illsley said that businesses should be cautious of other Web 2.0 practices. While “crowd-sourcing” technologies ?used to formulate ideas among large groups ?could prove very fruitful for companies, businesses should be wary of such technologies until they mature, he said.

Tags: fi, google, google maps, mash, mashup, web applications

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Accenture’s head of research and development, Martin Illsley, on Monday advised businesses that mashups, web applications combined with more traditional business software, were becoming increasingly useful but have to be managed so as not to overwhelm IT departments.

“Systems can be integrated in a lightweight manner,” said Illsley. “But mashups and the like have to be managed very well or they drift out of the IT department into many departments. Most IT departments are aware of that and spend an awful lot of time trying to keep things together.”

While there are tangible business benefits to allowing employees to create their own combinations of applications, Illsley said,there has to be a balance between “stifling the process by making it go through 20 stages” and loss of control of the application.

“Today, if you want to build integrated back-end and front-end systems, you use technologies like Google Maps with lightweight APIs [application programming interfaces], whereas you used to buy several packages and integrate them into a framework,” said Illsley. “These days organisations can throw applications together quite quickly.”

Illsley said that businesses should be cautious of other Web 2.0 practices. While “crowd-sourcing” technologies ?used to formulate ideas among large groups ?could prove very fruitful for companies, businesses should be wary of such technologies until they mature, he said.

Tags: fi, google, google maps, mash, mashup, web applications

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Walls discussed how traditional desktop security measures are falling short in a Web 2.0 world and how developers need to take more personal responsibility for the security of their code.

Q: Whats the single biggest threat to applications on the internet?A: People. I know that sounds a bit simplistic and facetious but what it really comes down to has always been the way people use applications, and the way people use data. If everyone was honest, trustworthy and truthful, then we wouldn’t have security problems. On a practical level, we assume in the security business that everyone out there is deceitful, dishonest and trying to rob us all blind ?so we try to secure applications as well as we can.

In the world of Web 2.0, mashups and web-deployed applications, many of the issues we deal with are actually the classic issues around security and application development ?we need to make sure that the input data, ie the information that we’re entering into form fields in a web page, is actually valid data ?information that we want to have put into our system. And of course, the information that leaves your system is what you want to have put out.

Tags: application development, developers, fi, mash, mashup, web page

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Such is his dedication to his craft thatBooch refused to let a little thing like a heart attack last year get in the way of maintaining his blog. Spending an increasing amount of time on research,he remains an activeparticipant in IBM’s vision for next-generation software engineering, which includes experimenting with Second Life and mashups.

You blogged from your hospital bed last year. Do you have a mild case of cyberdependency or were you just staying focused? About an hour after I’d regained consciousness from my open heart surgery, I started a conversation with my nurse and mentioned that I had a blog. He visited the site real-time and suggested that he be my eyes and hands to blog for me while I lay there, still wired to a variety of software-intensive machines. So, I’d not call it cyberdependency, but rather I’d call it just exploiting the resources at hand.

Tags: cra, mash, mashup

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