Mashups
CDMworld Business Mashups
CDMworld creates Mashup applications for all types of business. By utilizing powerful applications, protocols
and standards we can quickly create a new application that meets a specific requirement by “mashing up” existing data, applications and infrastructure to meet the business need.
What is a Mashup?
In web development, a mashup is a web page or application that combines data or functionality from two or more external sources to create a new service. The term mashup implies easy, fast integration, frequently using open APIs and data sources to produce results that were not the original reason for producing the raw source data. An example of a mashup is the use of cartographic data to add location information to real estate data, thereby creating a new and distinct web API that was not originally provided by either source.
Types of mashups
There are many types of mashups, such as consumer mashups, data mashups, and enterprise mashups. The most common type of mashup is the consumer mashup, aimed at the general public.
Data mashups combine similar types of media and information from multiple sources into a single representation. One example is AlertMap, which combines data from over 200 sources related to severe weather conditions, biohazard threats, and seismic information, and displays them on a map of the world; another is Chicago Crime Map, which indicates the crime rate and location of crime in Chicago.
Enterprise mashups focus data into a single presentation and allow for collaborative action among businesses and developers. This works well for an Agile Development project, which requires collaboration between the Developers and Customer proxy for defining and implementing the business requirements. Enterprise Mashups are secure, visually rich web applications that expose actionable information from diverse internal and external information sources.
Business mashups
Mashup use is expanding in the business environment. Business Mashups are useful for integrating business and data services, as Business Mashups technologies provide the ability to develop new integrated services quickly, to combine internal services with external or personalized information, and to make these services tangible to the business user through user-friendly Web browser interfaces.
Business mashups differ from consumer mashups in the level of integration with business computing environments, security and access control features, governance, and the sophistication of the programming tools (mashup editors) used. Another difference between business mashups and consumer mashups is a growing trend of using Business Mashups in commercial software as a service (SaaS) offering.
After several years of standards development, mainstream businesses are starting to adopt Service-oriented architectures (SOA) to integrate disparate data by making this data available as discrete Web services (Microsoft prefers the term XML Web Services to indicate standards-based SOA services). Web services provide open, standardized protocols to provide a unified means of accessing information from a diverse set of platforms (operating systems, programming languages, applications). These Web services can be reused to provide completely new services and applications within and across organizations, providing business flexibility.
Many of the providers of Business Mashups technologies have added SOA features.
Architectural aspects of mashups
Architecturally, there are two styles of mashups: Web-based and server-based. Whereas Web-based mashups typically use the user’s Web browser to combine and reformat the data, server-based mashups analyze and reformat the data on a remote server and transmit the data to the user’s browser in its final form.
Mashups appear to be a variation of a Facade pattern. That is, it is a software engineering design pattern that provides a simplified interface to a larger body of code (in this case the code to aggregate the different feeds with different APIs).
Mashups can be used with software provided as a service (SaaS).
After several years of standards development, mainstream businesses are starting to adopt Service-oriented Architectures (SOA) to integrate disparate data by making them available as discrete Web services. Web services provide open, standardized protocols to provide a unified means of accessing information from a diverse set of platforms (operating systems, programming languages, applications). These Web services can be reused to provide completely new services and applications within and across organizations, providing business flexibility.
CDMworld is focused on Business Mashups and by utilizing the broad suite of CDMworld SaaS applications in conjuction with other data service API’s and web services we are able to provide clients with the unique opportunity of creating new services (mashups).
These new and exciting mashups act as a platform for starting a new business, expanding income opportunities of an existing business or quickly meeting a workflow demand within a business.
CDMworld not only creates the Business Mashup for the client but we then support the use of the mashup with technology and digital marketing support.
Contact CDMworld today to discuss your application needs.
