Andrew Powell

Let's start this conversation by taking a look at what defines a "mashup". A mashup is, according to wikipedia, "a mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool". Well, that's pretty straightforward. Eventhough it's straightforward, I must contend that, like AJAX, it's nothing new. We've been doing this for years with ColdFusion, Java, and various other languages.

One of the very first ColdFusion apps I wrote combined information from a database with information from a LDAP directory. Now, I didn't call it a "mashup", it was just the application that I needed to build. ColdFusion, that tool that we all know (and most of us love), has been able to take data from multiple sources and combine them into a single integrated tool for years. So has Java via the J2EE standards, and even Microsoft has had the ability to do this for years. So why all the hoopla over mashups in the last year or so?

Mashup, the term, is brought to you by the same marketers who tried to sell you "Web 2.0" as a new buzzword. It's a term that has been coined to describe the rise of SOA as a major player in core application functionality and interoperability. Once developers got the idea that we can merge data from these disparate sources, we started to get the idea that these new types of applications, mashups, were viable as applications that can help drive business forward.

The next phase of the mashup is to combine not only data from different SOA providers, but hardware as well. Merapi is a step in this direction. With Merapi we can send data from disparate SOA sources to hardware devices and data from hardware devices into our data service providers. Hardware mashups let us move beyond what we can conceptualize in the application and go into the physical realm of hardware. It seems to me that the next generation of mashups, let's call it "Mashups 2.0", to be constant, is the marriage of existing SOA and hardware.

Are mashups a craze created by marketers? Yes. Do they have a place and a purpose? Most definitely. I have to admit, I'm much more comfortable with mashups than Web 2.0, as a term (side note: Web 2.0 is my least favorite computing term of the last ten years, but I digress), because I think mashups fosters more creativity and forces people to create new and interesting applications which may, or may not, use technologies deemed to be Web 2.0. However, do not take this to mean that mashups and Web 2.0 are mutually exclusive. Web 2.0 needs mashups to thrive in order to stay relevant. Without the mashup, Web 2.0 is just another buzzword. However, I think that mashups will be relevant long after Web 2.0 has passed us by.