April 7th, 2008

Is Mashup a Dirty Word? Serena Video Gets 1 Million YouTube Views

It’s not often, or ever, that a video about web mashups hits number one and gets over a million views on YouTube. But that’s exactly what happened with the fun video “Just @#$% It!! What are they saying?”, produced by the team at Serena to promote their enterprise mashup tool suite. The video follows a gossip-like chain of conversations among a group of office workers as they tell each other about building mashups. But, any form of the word mashup gets bleeped-out as a dirty word. And as you can see in the 500+ YouTube viewer comments, there has been a lively discussion about what they’re really saying, with guesses including “budget”, “patch”, “bash” and words that might really get bleeped on television.

For another rare humorous video about web mashups, there’s last year’s Man on the Street Video: What’s a Mashup? video taken on the streets of Dublin.

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Posted by John Musser as Enterprise, Tools, Video, fun at 1:29 AM | 1 Comment »

April 1st, 2008

Google’s New Visualization API

It has been a busy stretch for Google APIs: besides the recently released new AJAX Translation API this month, Google also launched the Google Visualization API, a JavaScript API which lets you access multiple sources of structured data that you can display using a large selection of visualizations. The Google Visualization API also provides a platform that can be used to create, share and reuse visualizations written by the developer community at large. For more technical details there’s a new Visualization API profile here and a new mashup listing for Motion Chart, a dynamic Flash based chart to explore several indicators over time.

Digging into the documentation you’ll find a more detailed description of the API:

Google Visualization API is a JavaScript API for web developers and gadget developers to access and display tabular data from many sources, for example Google spreadsheets….The Visualization API addresses two common problems in data visualization: 1. How to read data from multiple data sources using a single API. 2. How to process the data without knowing about the data source implementation.

It’s important to realize that the only data source that can currently be read using the Visualization API (a “compliant data source”) is a Google Spreadsheet and the API doesn’t yet define how to implement a compliant data source. Since Google Spreadsheets already has a RESTful GData-based API (Google Spreadsheets API Profile), you might wonder what’s the point about having yet another API to access Google Spreadsheet. The point is: the Visualization API is meant for tabular data from any source, not just from Google Spreadsheets. In the specific case of visualizing data, you won’t need to know the details of the Google Spreadsheets API to get at data from a Google Spreadsheet.

The Visualization API can be used to display data from data sources in a variety of contexts, most prominently in Google Visualization Gadgets that can be displayed in iGoogle or a Google Spreadsheet (akin to embedding a chart inside an Excel spreadsheet). A quick way to see the Visualization API in action is Google Visualization API Gadget Gallery, a showcase for what people have done with these gadgets so far. Follow the instructions instructions on using Visualization Gadgets to apply these gadgets to your own Google Spreadsheet. To learn how to program with the Visualization API, start by working through “Hello World” example of the API and the tutorial on Gadget Extensions - Google Visualization API - Google Code.

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Posted by Raymond Yee as Enterprise, Google, Widgets at 12:37 AM | 1 Comment »

January 25th, 2008

IBM’s New Lotus Mashups

At this week’s Lotusphere conference IBM announced IBM Lotus Mashups, a new browser-based mashup builder for non-programmers. To be released later this year the application is designed to give users an easy way to build composite apps by combining internal enterprise data and services along with services from the open Web. Here’s a screenshot of the application (via Ed Brill):

The announcement outlines the core functionality including:

• A browser-based tool that provides easy assembly of new mashups
• A rich set of out-of-the-box, business-ready widgets
• A catalog for finding and sharing widgets and mashups
• A builder for the creation of widgets that access enterprise systems

For more, see coverage by Martin LeMonica, CIO Today and this hand-held video recording of the Lotus Mashup demo from the conference this week.

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Posted by John Musser as Enterprise, Tools at 1:49 AM | 3 Comments »

January 17th, 2008

Salesforce.com: 24 Billion API Calls So Far

24 billion, that’s how many API calls have been served by Salesforce.com so far. This statistic along with others like 130 million transactions daily, 61,200 custom applications, and 750 AppExchange apps, were all highlight on stage today by CEO Marc Benioff who’s kicking-off “Tour de Fource”, the next phase of their Force.com services (for more on Force.com, see our earlier coverage here and more on today’s presentation see good coverage from ZDNet’s Dan Farber). These moves continue to built-out “as a Service” pieces of what Salesforce calls their Cloud Computing Architecture.

This new phase includes enhancements such as per-login pricing for less frequently used applications, Code Share for collaborative development, and other tools known as Development as a Service, or DaaS.

The pricing is interesting because it’s a new variation of utility pricing, in this case pay-per-login. The list price a $5 per login up to a maximum of 5 per month with a discounted price of $0.99 per month through the end of 2008.

The DaaS piece features a new set of development tools and initiatives. The first is an IDE with a metadata API for richer code and data model capabilities. The second is a full source code repository for developer collaboration. And the third is the announcement that Salesforce.com will open source a number of their applications and host them at Google Code.

Lastly, Salesforce.com and Emergence Capital Partners have announced a new competition with a $1 million dollar prize and winners to be announced at Dreamforce 2008 this fall. We have now added this to our contests page.

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Posted by John Musser as Enterprise, Salesforce, Tools at 5:46 PM | No Comments »

January 3rd, 2008

Q1 Events: Enterprise Mashups and Money

Now that 2008 is here, it’s a good time to take a look at some of the upcoming conferences of note in the web platform and mashup world. The first two events are happening in just a few weeks: both are business-centric, one focused on enterprise mashups and the other looking at what happens when Web 2.0 meets Wall Street:

Open Enterprise 2.0 Mashups: Expanding Customer Value Networks: February 1, New York City. This is an east coast edition to last fall’s Silicon Valley event. The agenda covers a wide variety of enterprise mashup topics including strategy, tools, and APIs. The one-day lineup includes speakers from Google, Jackbe, Kapow Technologies, Mashery, Nexaweb and the University of Southern California (see the full agenda here). ProgrammableWeb readers can use this registration page to get a 40% discount until January 14th.

Money:Tech Conference: Feb 6-7, New York City. This new conference from O’Reilly looks at how the current generation of Web 2.0 technologies and ideas are impacting Wall Street today and where they might be headed in the future. It’s a very interesting schedule. Financial services companies are huge consumers and developers of web services and we’ll certainly start seeing more platform strategies at work here soon. For example, the session description for Data Demos notes that: “The stock market is the ultimate mash-up. It combines information from all sources – news, capital markets, human behavior, geography, etc. – to come up with liquid stocks and profits. Where are the best ideas coming from in mashing up data with stocks? We’ll showcase some of the best mashups out there, ranging from Ebay listings, to stock wikis, and on and on.” ProgrammableWeb readers can use the code “mt08pwb” to get 20% off registration.

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Posted by John Musser as Enterprise, Events, Money at 12:59 AM | No Comments »

December 28th, 2007

Microsoft’s SSL for Secure Map Mashups

If you’re interested in creating secure maps mashups the Microsoft Virtual Earth team has a new feature for you: SSL support. As .NET developer David Barkol points out: by providing SSL support the Virtual Earth API now offers something not yet available in Google Maps. This means developers can include a version of the VE map control from a https://dev.virtualearth.net address for any SSL-enabled applications they’re building without having to resort to requiring specific browser settings or server-side proxies.

David notes that “if you’ve ever placed a Virtual Earth map or Google map on an HTTPS page then you’re probably familiar with the mixed content message that appears when the page loads” and that this new VE capability directly addresses this problem:

While SSL support is not required for many mashups, this level of security will become more relevant as map mashups evolve into integral elements of enterprise applications, commercial mashups, and other higher-value apps.

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Posted by John Musser as Enterprise, Mapping, Microsoft, Security at 12:53 AM | 2 Comments »

December 11th, 2007

The LinkedIn API

Yesterday LinkedIn made a broad set of announcements including a new user interface, additional features like a news feed, and more details on their new developer APIs and platform. The API will be phased in over the next few months and we’ve created our initial LinkedIn API Profile here. It looks like a full-featured platform and as LinkedIn’s Lucian Beebe described yesterday in a post entitled LinkedIn’s Intelligent Application Platform, there will be two primary models for developing LinkedIn applications:

• Bring LinkedIn to your application. Using LinkedIn APIs and widgets, you will be able to integrate LinkedIn into your application by accessing information from a LinkedIn user’s network. Using this model, you can augment your web site with LinkedIn features, creating more utility on your site and the chance to stand out from the crowd.
• Bring your application to LinkedIn. You will be able to write professionally-oriented applications that run inside LinkedIn.com for maximum visibility in a purely business network. We have announced support for Google’s OpenSocial platform and will add other models in the future.

The first lets users “take their LinkedIn network with them” in a approach like most web APIs including the original Facebook API, or, as Marc Andreessen might describes it: a “level 1 access API”. The second model is similar to the Facebook Platform, or a “level 2 plug-in API”, that will build on Google’s OpenSocial standards.

Given that there are about 17 million members now and about 1 million more each month, There going to be lots of interesting ways developers can build value on top of this platform. One of the first partners is BusinessWeek who will use the API to embed links within content that allows you to click on a company name and see who you are connected to via LinkedIn.

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Posted by John Musser as Enterprise, Social at 3:03 AM | 6 Comments »

December 6th, 2007

Google’s New Chart API

Google continues to innovate on the API front, today releasing an API in a very different category: charting. What is it? From the FAQ: “The Google Chart API is an extremely simple tool that lets you easily create a chart from some data and embed it in a web page. You embed the data and formatting parameters in an HTTP request, and Google returns a PNG image of the chart. Many types of chart are supported, and by making the request into an image tag you can simply include the chart in a web page.” You can see more details on our new Google Chart API Profile here.

Steve Crossan from the Chart API team in Zurich notes via their blog that it’s one of Google’s simplest APIs yet: “Let’s get straight in with an example. This URL creates this image:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=s:hW&
chs=250x100&chl=Hello|World

“That’s it - no state, no calls, just send your data in an http request and get a png image graph back. Embed the request in an img tag and you’re done.” He notes also this was built as a 20% project to support services like Google Video and Google Finance.” Given that no API key is required, this is indeed a very easy API to start using right away.

Currently supported are line, bar, and pie charts, as well as venn diagrams and scatter plots. You can also add things like fill gradients and markers to charts.

Google does note there’s a limit of 50,000 queries per user per day. But this is a reasonable constraint given that most charts can be generated and then cached on developer’s own servers.

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Posted by John Musser as Enterprise, Google at 5:52 PM | 8 Comments »

December 3rd, 2007

Serena’s Business Mashups

The competition between enterprise mashup tools continues and the latest move comes from Serena Software who today began shipping their Serena Business Mashups 2008 platform. This release includes the visual design tool Serena Mashup Composer and the runtime engine called Mashup Server. As we covered earlier Serena’s looking to deliver point-and-click creation of business mashups with this new suite of tools and services.

This current release is for the on-premise installed version. In Q1 of next year the SaaS offering will be available enabling deployment and hosting of mashups in the cloud. Providing an on-demand version makes sense for the target market of business users who might want an option that doesn’t require the IT department (”innovation without permission” as Serena calls it). The tools are free and pricing for deployment of mashups via the full installed version begins at $10,000.

Later this month Serena will be releasing a set of 13 free, pre-built business mashups. Many of these are process-based applications where multiple steps and sources can be linked together via web services and corporate SOA interfaces. Some examples include:

• Salesforce.com Sales Discount Approval: A mashup that adds a sales discount approval process to Salesforce.com.
• From Request to Test Management with HP/Mercury Quality Center: Orchestrates activities between a request management process and test tools.
• Hardware and Software Change Requests: Mashup to manage the capture, triage and resolution process for change requests for a hardware or software system.

The rapid evolution of enterprise mashup tools has been one of the leading web platform stories of 2007 and will this certainly continue into 2008.

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Posted by John Musser as Enterprise, Tools at 2:02 AM | 2 Comments »

November 28th, 2007

Google’s New API Moves Outlook to GMail

If you’re at an enterprise that’s been thinking about transitioning your email infrastructure to a hosted software-as-service model then Goolge’s new Apps Email Migration API may be of interest. As you can see in our API profile the Atom-based API is designed to let corporate developers and email administrators do things like selectively move email messages across systems individually or in batches. This can appeal to larger companies that have more complex email and messaging platforms who may need to run systems in parallel or migrate groups or individual accounts over time.

As Google Apps product manager Gabe Cohen announced on their Enterprise Blog:

We’re excited to announce the new Google Apps Email Migration API, which can move email from anywhere – not just IMAP systems – to the Premier, Education or Partner Editions of Google Apps. If you need to migrate email from your users’ desktops, migrate email from a server not supported by the IMAP migration tool, or do a push migration because of your security policies, a tool built on this API could be the perfect answer…If you’re interested in building an email migration tool yourself using this API, you can create an administrator or end user tool to migrate email extracted from any data source. The email migration API is based on GData, so it’s easy to use, and you can learn all about it on the Google Code website.

One of the first third-party applications built on this API is gMove, our Mashup of the Day today from LimitNone. gMOVE is a migration utility for moving your Microsoft Outlook calendars, email, contacts and tasks to Google.

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Posted by John Musser as Enterprise, Google at 4:09 AM | 4 Comments »