Mashup Camp: IBM Demos a Dataflow Mashup Maker | July 23, 2007
by Jeb Boniakowski
One of the most interesting demos at mashup camp was IBM's DAMIA.
IBM has demoed other mashup-creation tools such as QEDWiki at previous mashup camps, but DAMIA is something new. The DAMIA user interface consists of a drag-and-drop building canvas on which the user arranges "operators", which are then connected with lines that represent flows of data. An operator, if I understood correctly, takes data and performs an action such as sorting or filtering, and then passes it to the next operator. Unfortunately, the market is no closer to standardizing terminology for these sorts of things than we were when we wrote our whitepaper a few months ago, so add "operator" to the list with module, widget, teqlet, etc. In the terms outlined in our whitepaper, DAMIA is a mashup builder who's output is a web service, as opposed to a web application like QEDWiki. DAMIA comes with a library of operators, but you will eventually be able to write your own operators in PHP. I think the current set of operators requires well-formed XML as an input (so its generally meant to work with RSS feeds and the like) and it passes XML between operators. The results of a user's DAMIA building can be published to an online repository called "Mashup Hub" for other users to access. It looks like it could be a powerful product.
I may have some of the details wrong here, but it will be clear soon enough when IBM launches this product suite for general consumption. It's great to see large companies like IBM professing a belief that better tools can dramatically change the way users build different types of software.
