Practical Mashups

Mashups don’t live alone. They connect to a dizzying array of information sources, both public and private, and deliver just-in-time answers to all sorts of destinations. Last quarter I took part in a cool project to integrate Jackbe’s Presto into WSRP-compliant portals like Oracle Portal/WebCenter, IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic, and the like. It was, in my opinion, a practical example of where mashups can add meaningful value in an enterprise. And I am proud to say that I’ve just completed yet another cool-yet-practical integration. JackBe’s Presto is now integrated with HP SOA Systinet through the HP Governance Interoperability Framework (GIF).

Imagine this: you use your friendly BEA/Oracle/Sonic/IBM ESB to create a new service endpoint against a database. But then what? Sure you can share it with the folks in the nearby cubicles in a direct ‘lemme email ya the WSDL’ kind of way. But any good enterprise architect knows this doesn’t work in any real enterprise. How would your 500 or 5,000 enterprise mashers (or your 50 developers for that matter) find this new service endpoint? And how do they know what it represents? And how can you ensure that only permitted users mash with it? And what happens when you make version 2, 3 or 4 of that service?

At JackBe we get asked these practical questions all the time and the industry experts talk about them quite a bit too. Our friend Dion Hinchcliffe, in his post 'The top10 challenges facing enterprise mashups', discusses governance, security and version control as some of the most important issues you need to tackle before your mashup effort is enterprise-ready. And Clint Boulton at eWeek wrote a well-titled article, ‘Mashups Show Promise but Require IT Governance’, on this topic just last week.

And now JackBe mashups can be created from secure and governed SOA services. Good and practical. We’re thrilled that HP has helped us address a common concern about mashups in the enterprise. HP and JackBe will be holding a webcast to discuss and demonstrate our new integration on March 12; you can register here.

I’ve got other projects in the works. Just wait until you hear what’s next!