More on IBM and Mashups: SOA Meets Situational Applications (aka Mashups) Part Two: Building the IBM Situational Applications Environment
by Bill Ives
The second article in the IBM and mashups series by IBMers, Andy J. F. Bravery, Luba Cherbakov, and Aroop Pandya covers “the IBM® experience in building the Situational Applications Environment (SAE), which has been developed to support the community-based computing that takes advantage of both traditional SOA and emerging Web 2.0 technologies and approaches.” It starts with a review of the roles in successful mashup development, the business users, the mashup assemblers, and the consumable builders. Sometimes people will cross over the roles but they each have different attributes and requirements.
There is a nice layout of a mashup development interface with links to apps, aggregated community ratings, discussion forums, search, activity monitoring, feed subscriptions, and news items. The article adds, “a catalog stores assets created or discovered by the community. These assets are either links to SAs or parts from which SAs are constructed. They might be Web services, JavaScript widgets, APIs, or code snippets—we call them consumables.”
They also provide observations of a mashup ecosystem in action. In the application life cycle “many SAs live for only a short period before being abandoned, or never become widely used beyond the original team that created them, some capture the imagination of a large number of people.” Examples of ones with legs are offered. The exposure of data through mashups has led to clean up, much like what occurs on Wikipedia. Managing the expectations of users, especially those beyond the original team that created the mashup are important.
They offer a few examples of business value and add that this will be the topic of the third article in the series. The article closes with some of the future directions for mashups at IBM and a long list of resources, many outside IBM. I found this a useful service. Thanks to Tomoaki Sawada for pointing it out to me.
