Mashups in Action: A Better Way to Trade

In past 'Mashups in Action' blog we have described mashups used in intelligence analysis, medical research, and most recently a dual-purpose community-building/data-sharing effort for a scientific community. So mashups can help make better spies, better doctors and better scientists. But other than the occasional flu shot, I don't expect most of us have much exposure to these professions.

Today's Mashup In Action story is about trading, a profession you have better odds of encountering in your daily toils. And in case you haven't cracked a newspaper in the last 9 months, this is an industry under immense pressure. With high interest rates and high home foreclosure rates, it comes as no real surprise that a venerable 50+ year-old institution like Bear Sterns could disappear in a matter of weeks or that many of its peers are losing billions a quarter. So mashups in action in this kind of turmoil is certainly something worth hearing about.

Financial Services is one of the world's oldest professions, started about 5 seconds after the 1st coin was minted. Accival, the trading division of the largest diversified financial institution in Mexico, is one of the oldest in its market and one that is known for it's innovation. They were awarded the Most Innovative Company from Information Week Mexico. Along with SOA, green and business-alignment initiatives (we created a loose translation of the Information Week article describing their efforts and their award that can be found here). And they are into mashups in a big way.

(Click on the image to see a full-screen version.)

Accival's goal was to provide real-time market information for their traders, sales force, and customers in order to take better buy/sell decisions. Like most organizations, the main impediment to this goal is disparity of the data sources including databases (often SQL Server), enterprise JavaBeans (via REST), and JMS queues (provided by Sonic). To make this happen, Accival designed an application called 'AcciFix' that provides direct orchestration between those data sources and an intranet application.

AcciFix is a robust collection of mashups and mashlets. One mashlet provides detailed information about an issuer selected by the user. The mashlet connects to a JMS queue to return real-time issuer bids and orders. There is another mashlet which provides information about issuers ups and downs, with some of the source information gathered via REST from an Java Enterprise Bean. There's yet another mashup that filters news-related information per issuer and one that lists issuers grouped by type of liquidity. (The screenshot is AcciFix with many of these mashups.)

Overall, it's an impressive collection of mashups. In an industry where failure can be cataclysmic, this kind of constant, obsessive innovation should be viewed as business-critical.

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Are Mashups the 'Agile' Part of Web 2.0?

I've been into computers since I was 4 years old. I went to an esteemed computer science school, or at least that's what they tell me. I've worked for every kind of software shop: the Big 6 (now 4) consultancies, a couple of startups, and even 'the Big O' (yes, Oracle). So I thought I was familiar with most techniques, theories and approaches to software development. Well, it seems I missed one.

About 8 weeks ago Deepak Alur, JackBe's ever-vigilant VP of Development, sent me a link to a video that was hilariously entitled 'Does My Bus Look Big In This?'. The co-presenters, Martin Fowler and Jim Webber, are apparently well-known personalities in the Agile community. They build a reasonable case for an 'Agile' SOA that is essentially ESB-less and they manage to work in a bunch of one-liners at the same time. What I didn't realize was that the video was just the beginning of a proverbial Agile blizzard.

Soon after I met Ira Gluck and Karen Castilon from Command Information, one of JackBe's newest partners. As it turns out, Command Information has a ton of Agile expertise and approached JackBe because they viewed mashups as a solution that matched the goal of Agile. They even delivered a paper on mashups at the Agile 2008 Conference in Toronto a few weeks ago.

But my string of Agile coincidences didn't t stop there. Marko Banjanin, a masters student at Erasmus University Rotterdam, contacted me to ask for help in investigating the relationship between agile project management methodologies and the development of enterprise mashups. In true Web 2.0 collaborative style, his research includes a survey that any mashup-aware technologist is welcome to participate in.

And I continue to see Agile everywhere I look. Borland, that long-lived purveyor of software development productivity tools, has 'gone Agile', it seems, and is telling everybody about it. And then there's the CIO.com case study of an Agile project gone terribly, terribly wrong.

Which brings me [belatedly] back to the question I started with: are mashups the Agile part of Web 2.0? For those of you who want to play in this game but, like me, are Agile noobies, I'd refer you to the Wikipedia entry for Agile. For me, the first few sentences seemed to cover the most important characteristic of Agile:

There are many agile development methods; most minimize risk by developing software in multiple repetitions (or 'iterations') of short time frames (known as 'timeboxes'). Software developed during one unit of time is referred to as an iteration, which typically lasts from two to four weeks.

It goes on at length to describe the 'types' of Agile, underlining exactly how little I knew about this area. But let's forget about my shortcomings for a moment and try to apply what we've learned. If you start with the 'big 4' of Web 2.0 technologies (blogs, wikis, mashups, and RIAs), I think it is fair to say that blogs and wikis have their value but certainly don't directly apply to the 'developing software' part of the Agile definition.

That leaves RIAs and mashups. Certainly, RIAs are software development tools that result in applications that can be deployed easier than their desktop counterparts. But do we talk about RIA development in two to four weeks? Perhaps so. Certainly JackBe's own experiences with RIA tools bears this out.

And then there are mashups. At JackBe, we often see mashups created in time spans from minutes (yes, really) to a few days. The longer ones typically have some mitigating circumstance such as multi-step service interfaces (thank you, Salesforce.com) or a sophisticated RIA UI that fronts them. And just like an Agile project, we often iterate through many versions/renditions of a mashup, adding more sources services or a better presentation interface. That sounds Agile-ish, I think.

So perhaps both mashups and RIAs can lay claim to the Agile Web 2.0 crown. If you're an adherent to the Agile creed, I'd love here what you think!

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Revisiting the Synergies of Enterprise Mashups and SOA

We have opined about the synergies of mashups and SOA many times in the past (here, here and here, for example). But by far our most memorable and comment-provoking post was 'Implementing SOA without Enterprise Mashups? You might as well kiss your job goodbye' in August 2007. It remains one of my personal favorites largely because the ideas in that post seemed to appear fully-formed in my head.

To celebrate the 1-year anniversary(ish) of kissing our jobs goodbye, JackBe has published articles in SOA Magazine and SOA World Magazine that greatly expand on the synergy between enterprise mashups and SOA.

SOA Magazine has published part 2 of a 3-part series, ‘Enterprise Mashups Part II: Why SOA Architects Should Care’. Part 1 of this series, ‘Enterprise Mashups Part I: Bringing SOA to the People’ can also be found online. The final act of this opus (Part 3) should be published in a month or so.

SOA World Magazine has published ‘Enterprise Mashups, The New Face of Your SOA’. You can download the digital edition of the magazine (for at least the next month) for free by registering with Sys-Con.

We think both articles contain some genuinely innovative thoughts that evolve the mashup-SOA conversation we started a year ago. The techniques and best practives for SOA has evolved a great deal in the last year. I hope you’d all agree that we've also advanced the mashup-SOA conversation as well.

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