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DreamFace Interactive's Web 2.0 Framework « Mashups »
October'07 Even a cursory examination of what people are doing every day on the Web right now tells us that mashups,a form of ad hoc Web sites created on the fly out of fragments of other Web sites, are indeed happening in a large way, albeit in simple forms today, by the tens of thousands online every day. And while mashups inside our organizations, whether in the IT departments of in the lines of businesses, are still a rarer occurrence, it is worth noting that McKinsey's recent global executive survey of Web 2.0 in business said that 21% of large businesses across the board are planning investment in mashups in 2007, but a sobering 54% of business executives also said mashups were not yet under consideration. Benefits of Mashups As mashups are not driven by a centralized industry or standards body, but much more - in true Internet way - through a spontaneous activity of individual users at the edge of the network, a formal understanding and appreciation of mashups is difficult to avail. Some key benefits, however, are now clearly identified:
Simple, lightweight model of service and software consumption The mashup model focuses on the simplest techniques and formats, snippets of Javascript scripting language and XMLbased feeds for instance, which are both in widespread use on the Web and somewhat standardized into the new generation of Web browsers. Increasingly, Web sites are providing such technical access and formats for their published content making it easier to pull in even richer widgets and feeds for recomposing new mashups. From the more traditional software perspective, mashups are a user-oriented icon for software-as-a-service. Mashups require no lengthy installation, no complex maintenance and update releases, and virtually no administration headaches.
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Effective leverage of the Web fragmentation into widgets Mashups are assembled from existing bits and parts collected from public Web sites, resorting to actual code programming only when the required Web parts can't be sourced. Furthermore, the current state of the art in mashups also requires that code be programmed to design interactions within a given mashup--usually in the form of Javascript, or other scripting languages, programs. Thus mashups effectively use the wealth and reach of the Web to bring data and processes, remotely located and provided, to bear on problems at hand. Mashups are the user-facing version of the "reusing components" goal of software methodologies, still so elusive in the programming industry. In contrast to the mitigated results of previous cycles, such as modular programming and object-oriented programming which were invented by and for specialists, mashups are bound to a much more convincing success as they directly address end-users' needs and requirements, and instantly leverage the formidable reach, ubiquity and popularity of the Web standards and protocols. Focus on do-it-yourself (DIY) and self-service applications As amply demonstrated by the success of the Web2.0 participative architecture, mashups have the potential to give all of us the ability to create real, useful software. While purists would (rightfully) insist that the current crop of mashups lingers in the bottom part of the software complexity pyramid, it is precisely the emphasis on selfservice and DIY that means that applications that could never have been justified on a build-versus-buy perspective, and took too long to acquire to really help, are now possible at low cost.
In this view, enterprise and professional software and services developers should take notice. Increasingly, offering to their own population of users a platform to mashup their specific product with external content is turning from a "nice to have" to a "must have" feature for the emerging user-doer audience.
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Needless to say, mashups afford many more advantages and benefits to different classes of players in the software industry. Mashups, because they are open and highly visible, encourage information sharing and transparency. Mashups promote participation and sharing, adding a "social" facet to the Webbased GUI they are initially used for. They foster better identification and further segmentation of users' populations, which might be a critical step of an online monetization strategy, for instance.
DreamFace Interactive addresses challenges and opportunities of mashups There are still obstacles to the full realization of the latter mashup benefits, which the DreamFace Interactive Framework is directly targeted at. They fall into two broad classes: technical and "cultural" challenges. On the technical side there are already too many widget formats and too many incompatible platforms for publishing widgets. Major Internet players as well as a growing multitude of Web 2.0 startups are vying to promote specific APIs and formats for widgets. This proliferation generally works against the open, interoperable principle of mashups construction as it makes it difficult to mix and match best of breed widgets into an individual mashup. The DreamFace Interactive Framework actually leverages this diversity. The DreamFace DataSource abstraction directly maps heterogeneous Web data sources, including widgets from different API models, into seamless Web components directly available to non-programming inclined end users to design their own mashups. In addition, DreamFace Interactive based WebChannels/WebPrograms may be used from within any other widget publishing and sharing platform, whether a social networking one (Facebook, for instance), a SaaS one ( Salesforce.com, for instance), or a corporate intranet Web site. Another technical difficulty confronting mashup designers and users, which also often surfaces as a cultural challenge, is the tension
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between the general availability of data and services on the Web and the corporate environment where security, identity and authentication are critical. Current approaches to mashup constructions makes it extremely difficult, if not right away impossible, to tie together data from the corporate intranet and from the external Web into meaningful and immediately useful mashups. One is left with the options of either using "public" mashups, mixing data from Web sites generally available to the public, or using enterprise-specific mashup applications--which unsurprisingly look then more like corporate portals--simply adding controlled access to some of the legacy enterprise applications. In addition the latter thin corporate mashups cannot be personalized to cater the individual needs of each user, even less provide adequate tools for end-users themselves to customize their experience. In the DreamFace Interactive Framework, users' preferences and profiles, which are generally required for perusing "public" Web sites, and her roles, privileges, and identities compulsory for data access and services inside the firewall are subsumed into the Persona abstraction. Persona are used at all levels of DreamFace Interactive based mashups to customize each and every aspect of the user experience. From the graphical layout of the display, to the password and access keys to remote accounts on social Web sites or SaaS platforms, to private corporate privileges as database and enterprise applications users--which may be themselves stored away under centralized control of a corporate directory or distributed across each corporate application authentication mechanism--each DataView, Screen, WebProgram and WebChannel in a DreamFace mashup can be customized, by users themselves, through their Persona. Persona also handle security and authentication on the corporate intranet side, when DataSources plug into enterprise databases and business applications. The Persona-driven nature of DreamFace Interactive mashups finesses the technical barriers to mixing data and services from the Web and from inside the firewall into a unique, interactive mashup. And furtenterprisehermore, the cross-barrier, interactive mashup can be personalized, shared and searched by users themselves without having to resort to programming. Another issue is the long cycle of enterprise application Web enablement. Although technical standards and tools for Web
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Services have been ready for now quite a while, the uptake of SOA by corporate MIS has not been as fast as originally touted. Technical, domain-specific and sometimes cultural challenges persist even to this day in many cases. Is there enough Web services available to supply the data and back-end functionality to mashups? Lots of data on the Internet and our intranets are still in static Web pages in the form of HTML. The unique combination of DreamFace Interactive DataSources and DataViews address this somewhat still static state of databases and repositories. DreamFace Interactive WebChannels and WebPrograms are a perfect fit for dressing up SOA applications both in serving them through a customized GUI to their end-users and, more importantly, in enabling the same users to further tailor the mashup that incorporates SOA applications, adding interactions and commands to link several DataViews on otherwise unrelated pieces of data, for instance, or embedding business insight into DreamFace Business Rules and Variables thus enriching the application itself in context. Using the DreamFace Interactive Framework, these interactions and business insight rules may be shared and reused for other WebChannels/WebPrograms geared at other workers and business partners. As such, because the DreamFace Interactive Framework embeds what works best in Web 2.0 applications while taking into account from the ground up the enterprise context, it reconciles the two conflicting views on mashups. In a DreamFace Interactive mashup, a WebChannel/WebProgram leverages completely customized access to data, whether it originates in a corporate database inside the firewall or in a remote Web 1.0 or Web 2.0 site providing specific services, into a seamless individualized user experience.
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DreamFace, the DreamFace logo, DreamFace Interactive, WebPrograms, WebChannels and Persona are trademarks of DreamFace Interactive, SARL. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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