Todd Biske: Outside the Box

Presenter: Anthony Bradley

This presentation has started out with the unsurprising news that enterprise adoption of mashups is significantly trailing its use in the open Internet. He’s come up with a two-faceted classification model for mashups. The first facet is the integration pattern, which is one or more of the following (these aren’t mutually exclusive):

• Visualization integration
• Content integration
• Gadget page space co-location
• Gadget page space integration

The second facet is the application type, which can be one of:

• Personal portal delivery
• Packaged application extension
• Location awareness
• Panoramic awareness
• Situational awareness

All in all, I’m not sure what value this is bringing. I’ve posted previously on categorizations and taxonomies and how they need to have some purpose behind them. I’m not seeing the purpose behind these classifications. Typically, I’ve used classifications in reference architecture work where I try to map a particular type to particular constraints/patterns on the architecture and design, and I don’t see how these groupings do that.

He now had one slide that talks about the need to architect systems that allow them to be “mashable.” This I agree with, but again, it’s nothing new. We’ve been talking about this since the early days of portals, and you could even argue that it’s been around longer than that. He did present a proposed architecture for some of this at the end that may prove valuable to some attendees. Unfortunately, I don’t think he convinced anyone in the audience that mashups is something they should be thinking about. Personally, I think even the term puts some people off. I’d rather hear about the need to support “integration at the glass.” There’s too much of an association between mashups and just throwing something on a Google Map to make it have broader appeal, in my opinion.