Mashups in Action: Fusing Enterprise Mashups to Enterprise Widgets

Do you know widgets? You’ve probably used these shrink-wrapped micro-applications on one website or other. Google has made widgets a staple of their information-from-any-source iGoogle interface. Amazon has their ‘Pay Now’ widget. Yahoo has a nice collection of them. NVidia has one (that is decidely developer-centric). And they seem to be quite popular with the Facebook crowd. There’s even a widget tracker/aggregator: Widgets Lab.

But where are they in the enterprise?

Richard Monson-Haefel from Curl recently gave the subject of enterprise widgets a very thorough consideration. Like a lot of their Web 2.0 cousins (wikis, blogs, etc.), widgets have some great enterprise potential. SalesForce.com widgets are an increasingly popular topic among RIA developers (there’s a good example here). And last month JackBe formally announced ‘mashlets’, a fusion of enterprise widgets and enterprise mashups. Take a mashup, give it a widget 'face', and you got yourself a mashlet.

So where’s the ‘Mashup in Action’ in this discussion? JackBe recently helped a multi-billion dollar data-provider (who wants to remain nameless for now) implement mashups and corresponding mashlets on top of their large community portal. The mashups are dynamic, user-specific previews of the user's overall contribution to the community that bring together the user’s up-to-the-minute information from the community portal, the user's personal data-sharing/security settings, and a modest amount of information from outside the community as well. The mashlets for these mashups were designed to be easily be embedded in a user's personal blog/website or emailed to peers. Hover over the mashlet and you get a small dynamic preview of the data from the community); click on the mashlet and you get taken to that user's page within the community.

It’s quite an instructive and sexy story of mashups and mashlets in a corporate context. By all accounts, it was an immediately successful addition to the community. Within days and without any promotion/advertising (or tech support) to its community, there were over a hundred independent professional blogs/websites with mashlets in them. The community members used the mashlets to extend the community's reach well beyond the formal boundaries of the community portal. Now THAT’S Mashups (and Mashlets) in Action!

We’ll publish a few mashlets from this organization as soon as we can. For now you can take a quick peek at the sample mashlets embedded in this article; it took only a few minutes to create amashups from a spreadsheet and create the sample chart/grid mashlets from that mashup. If you look closely you'll see that the mashlets are dynamic (if the data behind them changes, so will the mashlets), interactive (in these simple mashlets you can sort and rearrange; it more robust mashups you could filter and even update the data), and portable (each has simple calls to embed them in a portal, wiki or email note). We also have a couple of more substantial mashlets on our Demos page. And we’re holding a free webcast about Mashlets on May 28 (you can register on our Events page).

Basic Chart Mashlet (click to try it)

Basic Grid Mashlet (click to try it)

This story, and mashlets in general, is all about enterprise-spanning data collaboration. They make data more fluid, making it trivial for non-technical users to fashion their own information solutions and then share them with peers. ‘Widgets’ may sound too cute-and-cuddly for the enterprise. Enterprise architects and business managers would do well to consider not the name but the potential behind the name.