A while back, I reported that we are giving a talk at the OASIS Symposium on Enterprise Mashups: http://events.oasis-open.org/home/symposium/2008/ . Fate be it, I could not attend the symposium due to necessary surgery and missed the excitement and discussion of our presentation. However, I can give you the highlights of the presentation for those of you who may be focusing on mashup technologies and may regard the term as an application composition methodology on the client.
The talk focuses on very popular term, "mashup" and the qualities of mashups that are required for an enterprise application, and also the need/use of standards in this area. We argue that a clear taxanomy is needed in order to make mashups for the enterprise real where the client platforms are going to play an important role as a real tier for developing, delivering and composing applications. While the term mashup got popular with client frameworks, we see further shift to use of cross tier services in order to enable mashups in an enterprise environment. We argue that mashup should not be considered with a very narrow definition in order to make enterprise qualities real. We propose an Enterprise Service Composition Platform and its characteristics to enable enterprise quality mashups.
Our talk was covered in the following Infoword Article. Interestingly, the review focused on a set of vendors who are shifting compositional capabilities to server side instead of thinking of mashups on the client only. The important focus of our talk was actually to illustrate that mashups for the enterprise are not necessarily client or server side capabilities or limited to data services only. Instead, we illustrate a taxonomy of capabilities with a sliding rule in each category for enterprise composition and illustrate what is needed to be part of such an architecture for composition at multiple tiers.
We are working on an experimental platform at SAP research which utilizes the client as a real tier in the composition of a total application with several components that utilize cross tier services. Scripting, event based composition and services are essential in this environment and there are standards activities that are targeting pieces of the taxonomy, some of which are emerging.
The slides can be obtained from
We will report of our progress in this exciting research area as time progresses.
