SaaS vendors need to get a clue about open APIs. That’s the takeaway from a panel discussion at last month’s Interop event in Las Vegas. According to Network World’s coverage of the session on Herding Cats: Managing SaaS Sprawl, with panelists from Boomi, Appirio, OpSource, and NetSuite, too many SaaS vendors do not consider including an open API as a core part of their service:
Today at its latest Campfire One event, Google announced major updates to Google App Engine, their scalable cloud computing platform for web applications. App Engine developers will soon be able to create web-scale applications using standard Java APIs, and will be able to create AJAX components using Google’s Web Toolkit. Other major features include cron support for scheduling tasks, tools for securely accessing and importing data, and a new Google development plugin for the Eclipse IDE.
In a pragmatic new article for Wall Street and Technology entitled Mashups Slowly Gain Traction on Wall Street, Melanie Rodier provides an overview of how a growing number of financial firms have started turning to mashups to save money and improve operations. The article highlights a new report by the Aite Group that projects that financial firms will spend $35 million on mashup technology in 2009 and includes several insights from Adam Honore, author of the report.
Mashup software provider JackBe has issued a challenge for folks to come up with a user-friendly (read: non-techie) definition of the term enterprise mashup. Although you won’t necessarily earn much money (a $50 Amazon gift card), you will earn the honorary title: Mashup CEO.
Last week the world’s largest annual computer expo, the CeBIT conference, was held in Hannover, Germany. While CeBIT still covers the latest physical advances in things like consumer electronics, server hardware, security and access devices, etc, this year there was also a focus on the application development side of technology. This included a large area devoted to open-source and a number of panels devoted to general education on topics such as Virtual Worlds, Digital Content Distribution, as well as a panel I moderated on Business Solutions with Enterprise Mashups.
Whether you’ve heard of it or not, Platform as a Service, or PaaS, is an emerging trend that is quickly giving way to thousands of mashups across the web and corporate Intranets. A new article in the E-Commerce Times entitled “The PaaS Era, Part 1: Everybody’s Pounding Out Mashups” highlights the growth of mashups as web startups and established companies continue to open up their platforms to third party developers.
If you are not familiar with the Google Documents List Data API (our Documents List Data API Profile), it allows client applications to upload documents to Google Documents and list them in the form of Google Data API (”GData”) feeds. Until recently, the API enabled users to download files in their original format, but the developer community was active in requesting exporting capabilities, and today developers can use the API to download documents in a variety of formats including PDF, Microsoft Word, SWF, RTF, and Open Document Format.
Most mashups rely on some type of API that’s freely provided by a public web site. ProgrammableWeb tracks thousands of these resources across dozens of categories. Generally, these interfaces are SOAP or REST-based, but they may also work in cooperation with other open formats like RSS or Atom. In an enterprise setting, mashups have a more diverse set of protocols to potentially leverage including JDBC/ADO.NET (databases), SMTP/IMAP (email), and SNMP (network monitoring). Unless you are building a data mashup, one of the participants API’s is usually focused on visually representing the data. It could be the classic Google Maps API, or perhaps some type of charting (Google Charts is a great resource).
A recent report by the Aite Group entitled “The Case for Mashups in Capital Markets” projected that despite the current financial climate, capital market firms will spend $35 million in mashup technology this year. According to the report, which surveyed 13 major capital market firms around the world, these companies will be willing to invest in mashups in order to address a variety of business processes:
Although mashups started out in the consumer space, their success makes a migration into corporate IT environments inevitable. Firms exploring this new software development model may struggle at first to understand the importance of mashups from a corporate perspective. In the upcoming book, Mashup Patterns, author Michael Ogrinz provides a collection of use-case driven patterns intended to explain the value of enterprise mashups to both technical and non-technical readers. We recently interviewed Michael about the patterns and what he hoped to achieve with his book.
©ProgrammableWeb.com 2009. All rights reserved.
Terms of Service | Privacy Policy
