Making the Most of the Web: Creating Great Mashups

But the advantage of in-browser mashups is the complete portability and mobility they offer.  When done with a little care, powerful integration scenarios, even enterprise-class integration, can be achieved simply by sending some properly crafted Javascript to a browser using a simple one-line URL.  Certainly companies like Kapow and others have been leveraging scenarios like this through combinations of browser and server solutions, and providing solid tools usable today.  But I still worry many of these are still too complex for many integration needs.  Why?  Google Maps mashups are so common because they're so easy to create.  This is just like any good Web 2.0 Web site: Radically low-barriers to use and adoption provides, you guessed it, much higher use and adoption (provided your service does something useful of course.)

How do we bring this ease of creation to the rest of the non-Google Maps mashup world?  Surprisingly, the answers might come from examples set by the likes of IBM, which has a new user-driven mashup creator called QEDwiki that:

The idea behind QEDwiki, which stands for quick and easily done wiki, is that businesspeople can create their own Web pages by dragging and dropping components onto a pallet, Smith said.  For example, a businessperson could build a "dashboard" to see how weather is affecting sales at retail outlets. By aggregating information from public Web sites, such as mapping and weather services, he or she could assemble a very useful, if simple, content-driven application, Smith said.

This makes me think of a similar software development phenomenon a few years back.  As much as I was never a huge fan of the earlier versions of Visual Basic, they did one important thing right.  They made it easy for even novice programmers to quickly create useful business applications from various back-end databases.  And while enterprise mashups are a whole different scenario, and my previously discussed mashup and Global SOA notions are a fascinating adjunct, none of this will matter until the right tools come.  Fortunately, I think help is on the way and I'm already seeing indications that this is going to be an active and important product space in the near future.

Good Mashup Tutorials and How-Tos:

Programmable Web:  How To Make Your Own Web Mashup
Dan Theurer: How To Build a Maps Mashup
Geocoding Tutorial: How To Build A Google Mashup
Mashup Tricks: How To Make Browsers Contact Web Services Across Domains
Example Web Mashup with Ruby on Rails: JobMapper
Mashups 101: Virtual Earth Map Control and Ajax
Screencast: Drupal Mashup Machine
Advanced: Mashing Up The Infoworld Explorer | Jon Udell

Update: Alex Bosworth just released this terrific client-side Javascript mashup utility for Digg integration.  It allows you to host a submitted Digg story right on your Web site.  And I couldn't resist trying it out, so here is this very blog post on Digg, right now: