Build Agnostic Map Mashups with Mapstraction

Andres Ferrate, July 3rd, 2008   Comments(2)

If you’re getting ready to get create a map mashup, but you can’t quite decide on which mapping API to use, you may want to check out Mapstraction. Mapstraction is described as:

A library that provides a common API for various JavaScript mapping APIs to enable switching from one to another as smoothly as possible.

In essence, Mapstraction allows you to build a map mashup that is not bound to any one mapping API and its provider, such as Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo!. Why would you want to be “API-agnostic” when developing a map mashup? Well, in addition to giving your end users freedom in selecting which base map they see, you can also use Mapstraction to easily switch your map mashup to a different content provider should the terms of use change or if the service becomes unavailable.

At present Mapstraction provides support for APIs from the following nine providers:

• FreeEarth (experimental support)
• Google
• Map24
• MapQuest
• Microsoft
• MultiMap
• OpenLayers
• OpenStreetMap
• Yahoo

That’s quite a list. In addition to being able to add GeoRSS and KML overlays to your maps, you can also do some geocoding and routing.

Check out our Mapstraction Profile for background on the API. You can check out all of the features that are available via the Mapstraction API documentation and there’s also a Wiki with additional information.

Some other things to note:

• Mapstraction is open source, and there is an SVN repository if you wish to contribute to the project.
• Mapstraction is used as part of the popular GeoPress WordPress Plugin.
• There is a new provider coverage map that shows map coverage by country.

One of the corporate sponsors of Mapstraction is Nestoria, a property search engine in the UK and Spain which we profiled in our mashup case study last year.

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Data Portability and Pushability with Gnip

John Musser, July 1st, 2008   Comments(1)

Gnip today announced a much needed piece of the web services infrastructure - a proxy service that sits between Data Publishers (like Digg, Flickr, and Twitter) and Data Consumers (like Plaxo and MyBlogLog) as a means to make moving structured data between services more efficient, flexible and scalable.

Up until now the systems for consumers to monitor the activity of publishers have been ad-hoc and typically based on polling their individual APIs. This is challenge for data consumers and as well as providers. For API publishers they face issues like multiple protocols and data formats to support, the need for API throttling and management, identity and security, and not least of all, scaling the service if you’re successful.

Gnip hopes to change that into a standardized model that combines both push and pull elements. This can benefit publishers and consumers by improving the latency from hours to seconds, solving the scaling problem of the API load, and removing the hassle of data conversion. From the blog post announcing today’s launch:

We built a system that connects Data Consumers to Data Publishers in a low-latency, highly-scalable standards-based way. Data can be pushed or pulled into Gnip (via XMPP, Atom, RSS, REST) and it can be pushed or pulled out of Gnip (currently only via REST, but the rest to follow). This release of Gnip is focused on propagating user generated activity events from point A to point B.

Gnip can be thought of as an ‘activity bridge’ for the social web, or as Nik Cubrilovic of TechCrunchIT put it, doing for social activity what pinging services have done for blogs. Except that the activities include more than blog posting - commenting, rating, sharing, tweeting, purchasing, attending and more. Gnip would like to normalize the names of all online activities - the full list of their initial set is here.

The advantage for publishers is that their activity streams can be posted once to Gnip, who will offload the push and pull servicing to many consumers,and provide the data translations. The advantage to consumers is standardized and timely notification. As Joseph Smarr of Plaxo describes it

For Plaxo users, the benefit is simple: when you digg a story or bookmark a link with del.icio.us, etc. you should see that activity show up in Pulse a lot quicker–often within 60 seconds, whereas before integrating with Gnip, it might have taken an hour or more. Starting today, Digg and del.icio.us should be very quick to update, with Flickr and Twitter hopefully following shortly.

The initial version of Gnip offers the notification service. Future versions scheduled for this year will include some very interesting enhancements:

• Gnip Notifications: For “Data Consumers” they can poll for new data the moment it exists. Avoid throttling & decrease latency from hours to seconds. For “Data Providers” it lets them reduce API traffic by an order of magnitude while increasing distribution through aggregators.
• Gnip Polling (coming soon): Offload API and RSS polling to Gnip and receive full content updates via your preferred protocol (REST, XMPP, ATOM, etc).
• Gnip Transformation (coming soon): Receive standardized cross-service XML markup and turn integrating with new APIs into a plug-and-play experience.
• Gnip Identification (coming soon): Let Gnip offer suggestions for your users’ profiles through a variety of identity discovery mechanisms.

In the initial version of the notification service Gnip is only reporting to consumers that an activity has occurred, with the identification of the source and the guid of the item that was rated or consumed. In later versions the activity itself will be part of the transmission.

The protocol bridge graphic above shows the different formats that Gnip will support. The Gnip API shows standard REST calls for both producer and consumer, and includes language specific convenience libraries in Ruby, PHP, Perl, Python, and Java. We have created a new Gnip API profile here.

The company is lead by Eric Marcoullier, who founded MyBlogLog and sold it to Yahoo last year. The full list of partners on the Gnip community site includes delicious, Digg, Flickr, Twitter, MyBloglog, and Six Apart.

For more details on the service see good writeups from Marshall Kirkpatrick and John McCrea.

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Google Launches Webmaster Tools API

Raymond Yee, June 25th, 2008   Comments(1)

As announced at Google Webmaster Central, Google has released a public API to automate the usage of Google Webmaster Tools. The Webmaster Tools gives web site owners detailed statistics about their site’s “visibility on Google”. According to the announcement, the new API supports the following interactions with the Webmaster Tool:

• Managing sites: retrieving, adding, verifying, and removing websites)
• Working with Sitemaps: retrieving, adding, and removing sitemaps

To get started, check our new Webmaster Tools API profile and consult the Developer’s Guide - Google Webmaster Tools API.

While not all of the functionality of the Webmaster Tools are available from the APl, the current API will probably be of interest to webmasters who manage many websites and who update sitemaps by manual processes. And as Google notes, “this [version] is only the beginning”.

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

John Musser, April 7th, 2008   Comments(1)

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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Platform as a Service via Bungee Connect

John Musser, February 19th, 2008   Comments(0)

Utah-based startup Bungee Labs is in the news today having taken the wraps off Bungee Connect, their web-based application development and hosting platform. Bungee aims to provide an end-to-end environment for developing applications in the cloud: from editing code through to debugging, deployment and runtime. Nothing installed locally, everything happens on their infrastructure. They’ve worked to make the programming experience familiar to developers as you can see in the screenshot below showing their browser-based code environment:

The service will be priced on a utility model where billing is based on the amount of time an application is used. Like Amazon’s utility services there are no upfront costs or fixed fees. Target customers are developers in small to medium sized companies or departmental groups in larger organizations. Note this platform, with its C-like language BungeeLogic, is designed for developers, in contrast to tools like Microsoft Popfly or IBM’s QEDWiki, both of which are targeted outside of traditional IT.

This launch is notable because there’s clearly a race on in this new market that’s now being called “Platform as a Service”. Players include companies like Salesforce.com and Etelos, and it’s widely expected before long a variety of major vendors including Microsoft, Google, Amazon and others will be increasing their offerings in this area. Whether that means discrete pieces like development tools, or deployment and runtime infrastructure, or metering and billing, we expect to see a real battle for developer’s hearts and minds on this front. For more, see coverage from ZDNet’s Dan Farber on this announcement.

In addition to the public beta, Bungee is also releasing a fairly sophisticated reference application shown below called “WideLens”. This mashup is a calendar application that reads and writes in realtime to sources including Microsoft Exchange, Google Calendar, Salesforce.com, Facebook, MySQL and iCalendar feeds. Running an application like this would cost somewhere between $2 to $5 per user per month.

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Bungee Labs is a ProgrammableWeb sponsor.

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Mashups Break the Microsoft Mold

John Musser, February 10th, 2008   Comments(3)

The New York Times has a piece today by John Markoff on Microsoft’s mashup builder Popfly entitled Mashups Are Breaking the Mold at Microsoft. Like many mashup tools, Popfly is relatively new, it went into alpha testing earlier last year and was opened to a wider audience last fall (for more you can see our Popfly launch coverage here). The Times story looks at how the project and team are not typical Microsoft: Popfly lead John Montgomery and his team of 17 is very small by Microsoft standards, they are building software inherently designed to be delivered over the Web, and it’s an innovative tool for building applications but the audience is non-programmers.

Introduced at the Web 2.0 conference last year by Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, Popfly was picked by PC World magazine as one of the most innovative computing and consumer electronics products of 2007. It has garnered more than 100,000 users — the company says the exact number is confidential — and now has a library of more than 50,000 “mashups”: new components or Web pages that have been created in a visual snap-together fashion, like Lego blocks.

Reference is made to some of the challengers: “Microsoft is certainly not alone in seeing this kind of an opportunity. Yahoo offers a widely used tool call Yahoo Pipes that offers some of the same capabilities as Popfly, and Google has designed a “mashup editor” for more skilled programmers.” And there are other challenges, the largest of which may be Web community skepticism because it relies on Microsoft’s own Silverlight technology as an RIA delivery medium (and indeed Silverlight, outside of Popfly itself, is being used for for some mashups today).

But in the end there’s an interesting question, and opportunity, that many mashup products are pursuing, of how to put more sophisticated tools in the hands of non-IT staff, be they in a corporate environment, at school or at home.

For his part, Mr. Montgomery believes that Popfly does have some very big ideas to offer the Web world. He is following in an important tradition that began in the 1960s with computer languages like Logo and Smalltalk, which were aimed at unlocking the power of computing for nontechnical users. Today he is betting that Popfly will offer a simple way to give the power of programming to the rest of us.

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IBM’s New Lotus Mashups

John Musser, January 25th, 2008   Comments(3)

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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Salesforce.com: 24 Billion API Calls So Far

John Musser, January 17th, 2008   Comments(0)

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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Serena’s Business Mashups

John Musser, December 3rd, 2007   Comments(2)

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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Mashup Startup Teqlo Folds

John Musser, November 9th, 2007   Comments(0)

Teqlo, an early mashup tools startup, is shutting down as of this week. As reported by Anne Zelenka at GigaOm yesterday, their doors are already closed and teqlo.com is no longer up. This does not come as a complete surprise given the struggles they’ve had this year including management turnover and changes in product direction. According to the report Teqlo founder Jacoby Thwaites confirmed that the investors had pulled out and said “We had great investors, great people and great technology, but we ran out of time working out what the killer product could be!”

Even though Teqlo has withdrawn from the battle, there are dozens of companies vying for position in the mashup tools market. For more on this competitive space see our earlier report on Challenges in the Mashup Tools Market.

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