Mash it up

Mash it up for a better user experience

The growing adoption of Web services and Internet applications has brought the concept of mashups into the limelight. By Priyanka Akhouri

Mashups can speed up the deployment of Web 2.0 applications. Web services are spearheading the adoption of rich Internet applications by developers and businesses alike. Many leading IT organizations have released or are currently developing mashups. This is an indication of the increasing interest of CIOs and enterprises in this new technology.

It is a matter of surprise that before stepping into the vast world of IT, mashups were a part of the music world. The concept or the term mashup originated from the pop music scene, where a mashup is nothing but a new song, which you create by mixing together existing vocal and instrumental tracks from two or more different source songs (usually belonging to different genres). Munindra Kumar, MD (India), Serena Software stated that the term ‘mashup’ actually started in the music community as people began mixing tracks from different artists to create new music. The Web development community adopted this term to mean a Web application that you assemble from multiple sources.

From the IT perspective, a mashup is a Web-based application that combines two or more different sources of content into a single view. A well-constructed mashup creates a unified end-user experience where the users are not even aware that the data and visual elements come from multiple sources. “A mashup is an unusual or innovative composition of content (often from unrelated data sources), made for human (rather than computerized) consumption,” said Lingeswaran M, Systems Analyst, Birlasoft (Chennai). For example, an application that was built from routines of multiple sources or a Web site that combines content and/or scripts from multiple sources is said to be a mashup.

The technology behind mashups

A mashup architecturally consists of three different participants that are logically and physically disjointed (they are likely separated by both network and organizational boundaries). These include:

• A public interface (API) or content providers [This is where you extract content from]
• The mashup site [This is where the mashup logic resides; it is not necessarily where it is executed.]
• The client’s Web browser [This is where the applications are rendered graphically and where user interaction takes place.]

Mashups help to expedite Web 2.0 deployments by making it easier for developers to put together information from diverse sources.

Speedy Web 2.0 deployments

Web 2.0 refers to a change in the way we use the Web from a static disseminator of information to a collaborative platform for interactions. For example, Kumar said, “An online encyclopedia is a Web 1.0 application because it presents information to site visitors, but Wikipedia is Web 2.0 because visitors actively contribute to the site, adding, removing, and modifying entries according to their area of expertise. These are fast and easy to plug-in.” This power of Web 2.0 is the reason for rich adoption of today’s Web services and Internet applications by developers and businesses.

There are many Web 2.0 applications available on various domains and developers need to consume these applications in their environment to meet their application objectives. Mashup technology helps to integrate these applications on the fly without having to write a single line of code.

According to Kumar, various folks from disparate domains contribute these Web 2.0 applications and make them available to everyone through the Web. This is a great assimilation of domain expertise through these applications on the Web. It is very fast.” Developers typically source content used in mashups from a third party via an API.

Portals experience various complexities such as users have to remember multiple URLs (one per portal) for access to information from the same organization and they have to know which portal contains what information. Often multiple portals have their own security infrastructures. In this manner, an organization has to spend additional resources in providing single sign on access to multiple portals. Therefore, the quality of service suffers especially when it comes to the ability to cross sell products and services. “Portals that support Web 2.0 standards are able to provide mashup functionality. Using this approach a business user can quickly produce new mashups from all the standard feeds that developers produce. In addition, developers can easily build AJAX-based user interfaces and add them into the wizard for users to select,” said Dhruv Singhal, Director, Sales Consulting, Fusion Middleware, Oracle (India).

Purpose of business mashups

Companies are debating on using some small applications that would help drive new business or make the operations more effective, or finding a way that could help them build these applications themselves. Mashup fulfills this purpose of businesses. They allow you to create automated processes, tie these processes with multiple back-end or cloud-based systems, while providing a unified experience. There is no need for any coding.

When it comes to business mashups, industry experts often stress on certain critical aspects that will affect their productivity. Business mashups put people, process, and data together in an application. Instead of relying on manual means—such as e-mail for coordination at work, business mashups automate critical activities across teams and systems so that there is maximum optimization of business. The relevance of this technology is that it harnesses collective intelligence and provides a rich Internet/AJAX experience. They allow you to create automated processes, tie these processes with multiple back-end or cloud-based systems, while providing a unified experience. Kumar views that business mashups are most relevant when there is a dearth of funds in the market, like today’s recessionary times.

In most organizations, there are additional automated business functions required by business units. However, the IT department focuses mainly on complex, high value applications and has no time to develop for the additional needs of business units. All these undeveloped applications form the long tail of application software. Application ideas on the tail end up in something called ‘the application backlog’. Business mashup technology can address the applications on this long tail and make the businesses more effective and efficient said Kumar.

According to Singhal, mashups give the ability to aggregate content and services from external sources into a single portal. This allows an organization to offer new products and services a lot quicker. For example, a travel industry portal can aggregate content from the meteorological department, hotels, airlines, etc., to offer holiday packages.

Most organizations are looking for ways to automate small but important human workflow-based business functions in order to remain competitive in this tough market. Getting these business functions developed through traditional software development processes could be tad more time consuming and expensive. Tools such as business mashups are the best alternatives in such scenarios. “A business mashup can assemble a business process with existing Web services-based applications, generating a totally new application on the fly which automates the proposed business function. Mashups on a SaaS platform will surely help to keep the bottom line safe for organizations,” added Kumar.

Serena Software, one of the pioneers in business mashups, provides its Mashup Exchange—a virtual community and a new marketplace for business people and their partners to connect around building mashups. At Mashup Exchange, one can find packaged mashups, template workflows, and professional service offerings. Anyone who downloads and uses Serena Mashup Composer will have access to the Mashup Exchange. This allows modifying these packaged mashups to suit the needs of the user. One can design any number of mashups and the payment happens only when it is published and starts using the mashup.

Benefits witnessed

Mashups come in three general flavors and can help the customer as per requirement—consumer, data and business mashups. Consumer mashups combine visual and data elements from two or more sources, whereas data mashups combine multiple data sources into a single source.

The benefits of enterprise mashups vary according to their usage. Business mashups solve business problems, which are typically process-driven. Business mashups allow combining visual and data elements from multiple sources within a process-driven framework. Unlike consumer or data mashups, business mashups keep the state of your process in progress and provide the data and visual elements you need when you need them.

The tangible benefits

• Faster answers: Mashups give you access to both internal and external information without an intermediary leading to faster answers. “For business scenarios, where performance is crucial, mashups provide the fastest way to access critical business information,” added Lingeswaran.
• Improved resource use: Mashups give business users the ability to assemble custom situational information solutions, and they do so from data sources they may have previously used. IT department is free to address other tasks, while previously underutilized data sources become more relevant.
• New opportunities: Because mashups let users combine data in new ways, they can support processes or decisions that were untenable even in the recent past.

Increasing significance

The need for extreme productivity dominates today’s competitive business scenario. Business process improvement through mashups is one way out. By using mashups, companies have the ability to solve business problems by providing faster, cheaper access to right information and IT capabilities.

They also allow companies to leverage their SOA investments. The problem many companies have had with SOA is that they are largely inwardly focused. This is where mashups can help. By providing a solution that lets users share their resulting services, the technology makes them a part of a service-generating network, allowing users to join in data from outside the enterprise. Companies and users are in need of collaboration tools to meet the rapidly evolving market’s demands, thereby increasing productivity. Mashing together internal and external functionality allows you to create new business capabilities rapidly, resulting in increase in business agility said Lingeswaran.

Given the fact that mashups lower operational costs, the technology helps create a more agile business that helps raise the value of a business. Mashup technology is rapidly finding its space in the market. Information quality increases by using mashups and allowing utility of computing reduces the cost of fielding and changing functionality.

Future impact

The technology mainly focuses on resolving the most of the composite issues of business that hamper productivity. According to experts, the technology is a great source for providing structural enterprise computing with information mapping, removing the distinction between outside and inside the enterprise, and enables you to integrate collaboration with back-end resources. Lingeswaran said, “The mashup technology could represent the next generation of enterprise computing, to create new and innovative capabilities. Additionally it is lighter in weight than portals and composite applications.”

Mashups are assembled from existing applications, so they depend on the robustness of the existing applications in terms of governance and security. However, the Serena Mashup Server supports staging of mashups, providing an environment where a mashup can be checked for security, compliance, etc., before being pushed into production. Gartner states that mashups are gaining attention in the corporate environment and will occupy a dominant position in the coming year.

priyanka.akhouri@expressindia.com