New Whitepaper: Understanding Mashup Building Platforms for Business Applications | June 12, 2007
by Jeb Boniakowski
In the last several months, we've gone to a quite a few conferences where we've had a chance to talk with people about mashups. There have also been many articles discussing mashups, what a mashup building platform should look like, and even comparing different mashup-building technologies.
We felt that there was a considerable degree of confusion around these topics. What are the salient features of a mashup? Who fits where in the technology stack and evolving ecosystem? Will apps characterized by the mapping mashups we've seen online ever have business value? We were frequently asked to make apples-and-oranges technical comparisons about products and companies in the mashup space. Without a comprehensive framework, these comparisons have at best been "round-ups" that broadly differentiate between products using a couple parameters.
With that in mind, we wrote a whitepaper that gives a brief overview of the space and also expresses our view on the future value of mashups in business and enterprise environments. Throughout the paper we build a framework that we hope illustrates what constitutes a mashup and how to evaluate different mashup products. At the end, we summarize this framework in 17 "evaluation criteria" and a corresponding illustration that anyone looking at a mashup technology for a business or enterprise application should consider when choosing which product(s) to use. It's our aim to clarify the roles of technology involved in building business mashups without making value judgments about specific vendors in the space. Please read it and let us know what you think.
