MASH-UPS -- a new breed of web apps....are explained in detail by IBM Developerworks(link to IBM mashup paper). Author Duane Merrill says mash-ups are a "genre of interactive Web applications that draw upon content retrieved from external data sources to create entirely new and innovative services". BLOGGER NOTE: Slashdot.org where this was first posted blasted the IBM paper as "FULL OF BUZZWORDS" -- this blogger was stunned that there were no examples in the whole article-- other than the Chicagocrime.org site. You may still want to go to the article for the RESOURCE section...But I thought I'd have fun explaining some of the buzzwords-- so that you can sound like a smart aleck when and know these buzzwords when they are discussed by web 2.0 freaks!
HIGHLIGHTS OF THE IBM MASHUP ARTICLE:
"Colloquially termed mashups, their popularity stems from the emphasis on interactive user participation and the monster-of-Frankenstein-like manner in which they aggregate and stitch together third-party data."
MASH UP ENTYMOLOGY: ......"etymology of the term (mash-up): it was borrowed from the pop music scene, where a mashup is a new song that is mixed from the vocal and instrumental tracks from two different source songs (usually belonging to different genres)."
SO WHAT"S A WEB APP MASH-UP LOOK LIKE? The ChicagoCrime.org Web site is a great intuitive example of what's called a mapping mashup.
MASHUP GENRES: Mapping mashups *Video and photo mashups *Search and Shopping mashups *News mashups
MASH UP TECHNOLOGIES: overview of the technologies that are facilitating the development of mashups--three different participants that are logically and physically disjoint: API/content providers, the mashup site, and the client's Web browser.
AJAX: Ajax is a Web application model rather than a specific technology.
Web protocols: SOAP and RESTBoth SOAP and REST are platform neutral protocols for communicating with remote services.Originally an acronym for Simple Object Access Protocol, SOAP has been re-termed Services-Oriented Access Protocol (or just SOAP) 2 Components of SOAP: The first is the use of an XML message format for platform-agnostic encoding, and the second is the message structure, which consists of a header and a body.
REST is an acronym for Representational State Transfer, a technique of Web-based communication using just HTTP and XML.REST fundamentally supports only a few operations (that is POST, GET, PUT, DELETE) that are applicable to all pieces of information.
SCREEN SCRAPING: lack of APIs from content providers often force mashup developers to resort to screen scraping in order to retrieve the information they seek to mash. Scraping is the process of using software tools to parse and analyze content that was originally written for human consumption in order to extract semantic data structures representative of that information that can be used and manipulated programmatically.
SEMANTIC WEB: the Semantic Web, which is the vision that the existing Web can be augmented to supplement the content designed for humans with equivalent machine-readable information.
The Semantic Web goal: creating Web infrastructure augmentng data with metadata, giving it meaning and making it suitable for automation, integration, reasoning, and re-use.
The W3C family of specifications collectively known as the Resource Data Framework (RDF)providing methodologies to establish syntactic structures that describe data. RDF-Schema, based upon XML-Schema, is used to define data objects and their attributes. The combination of data model and graph of relationships allows for the creation of ontologies, which are hierarchical structures of knowledge that can be searched and formally reasoned about. RDF data is quickly finding adoption in a variety of domains, including social networking applications (such as FOAF -- Friend of a Friend) and syndication (such as RSS). RDS query languages (such as RDQL and SPARQL) and programmatic frameworks and inference engines (such as Jena and Redland).
RSS:RSS is a family of XML-based syndication formats--syndication implies that a Web site that wants to distribute content creates an RSS document and registers the document with an RSS publisher. RSS has been adopted to syndicate a wide variety of content, ranging from news articles and headlines, changelogs for CVS checkins or wiki pages, project updates, and even audiovisual data such as radio programs. (BLOGGER adds -- podcasts, videopodcasts etc).
Atom is a newer, but similar, syndication protocol--seeks to maintain better metadata than RSS.
MASHUP GENRE IN INFANCY:
The mashup Web application genre is still in its infancy, with hobbyist developers who produce many mashups in their spare time. Before mashups can make the transition from cool toys to sophisticated applications, much work will have to go into distilling robust standards, protocols, models, and toolkits.API providers will need to determine whether or not to charge for their content, and if so, how (for example, by subscription or by per-use. Mashup developers might look for an ad-based revenue model.
Comments