Mashups

What they are: Mashups are applications that combine data from two or more online sources and run within a Web browser. Think of mashups as Web services lite. Mashups were born a little more than a year ago when Paul Rademacher, an animation expert at Dreamworks, created HousingMaps.com, which merged Craigslist and Google Maps to help people locate real estate listings. Since then, mashups have gained ground among developers; there's competition to create the most innovative applications. One of the most talked about mashups is the combination of Google Maps and the CRM application Salesforce.com.

Business benefits: Mashups offer faster and easier integration of some services than may be possible using Web services within a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Mashups are less complex, and developers concern themselves less about complying with technical standards because the applications are browser-based, according to consultant Dion Hinchcliffe, president and CTO with Hinchcliffe & Company.

One way mashups are making inroads into the enterprise is when corporate developers adopt the mashup approach for integrating data internally, says John Musser, a consultant who operates the Web site Programmableweb.com. Investment management company T Rowe Price, for example, has combined data from multiple applications in order to simplify its call centre systems. Kirk Kness, VP of architecture and strategy at the company, says he prefers to call the development technique "composite applications", because "the term mashup implies that we might be winging it, and we're not doing that". Kness and his team are using portal software from IBM and Ajax, a development methodology for generating interactive Web applications.

Meanwhile, IBM is working on a project called QEDWiki (so called because it uses wikis, a tool that allows multiple users to edit a Web page) that is designed to let businesspeople create their own Web pages by dragging information from both private and public Web sites. Using QEDWiki, an employee could integrate weather data, information from an ERP system and the location of company facilities in a single Web page.

"Companies have been wrestling with integration for decades," says Musser. "Mashups offer a whole new level of power and sophistication that comes for free."

The risks: These applications can have a lot of security holes. Some mashups that use Ajax scripts, for example, expose their code in the browser, which may allow the mashups to be used maliciously. What's more, passwords for accessing components of a mashup may also be exposed in the browser, putting the underlying services at risk. Hinchcliffe says that many mashups pull code in live from the Web (think of any service using Google Maps) and run without being previously tested. The danger there, he says, is that the code from an underlying source could change the next time the mashup is loaded, and users won't know what's in it.