Apparently we're not the only one's putting two and two together regarding mashups and portals.  I suppose it should have been obvious to us sooner.

This is the start of a change where enterprises will look for immediate results on integration projects, before investing further.  No more closing your eyes and praying for a good result at the end of a long implementation cycle.  Start pages and mashups provide quick feedback to see whether investing further has merit.

We're in the early stages of this change, where enterprises can benefit from a host of new technologies that make life a little easier for IT.  Technologies, practices, awareness, and everything else about it waill take some time to fully mature.  We're just glad to see more people getting on board and giving users more confidence in the value of this approach.

Here at Applibase, we're firm believers in the benefits of enterprise mashups as a lower cost and faster way to achieve many enterprise integration goals.  With our focus on the great technologies like AJAX, SOA, web services, etc., we've tended to focus on the more complex integration goals.  It's only more recently we've realized that often a quick early payoff for mashups is in enterprise start pages.

The low-hanging fruit for information integration in many enterprises is providing users quick access to the information they need, all in one screen.  Enterprise portals are already being used effectively to do just that.  However, the technology now being used for portals is clearly behind the curve.

Current Enterprise portals are expensive to develop, hard to change, and most importantly offer limited personalization for users.  The time has come for personalized portals that can very easily be setup and changed by administrators.  And even more easily personalized by portal users to meet individual needs.

With this new approach, portals can be setup in hours, and continuously changed.  The new portals let users place just the content they need, just where they need it. And choose from a broader range of options provided by administrators.  In short, more content and more control for portal users.  This is not your father's portal.

For many situations, the mashup portal is a good first step to seeing instant results.  It's only a slice of the many benefits you can achieve with enterprise mashups.  And as we all know, those integration projects could use some quick payoffs.

Now that we're close to opening up our service beta, we must do what we can to make things easier for users.

We simplified the name of  our integration server to Applibase Server, replacing Applibase DataCaster.  DataCaster will only be used as an internal name for our server.

Applibase Server

Applibase Server, our Enterprise Information Integration server, will bring together data from disparate sources, and allow rapid creation of integrated dashboards, views, and composite applications.  With our Mashup approach to re-using existing web services, widgets, and applications, integration benefits can be quickly realized in any enterprise.

Data Mashups Service

Data Mashups is an online service for small enterprises that enables custom, integrated business applications that mashup data (e.g. from your Excel spreadsheets), web services (e.g. Amazon or Google web services), web widgets (e.g. Google or Yahoo maps), and other web applications (e.g. Salesforce.com).

Enterprises can use the service to rapidly provide mashup applications and a personalized mashup portal to their customers and employees.  These applications may be imported, customized, or developed using the online mashup builder (AppliBuilder), and then used on your Mashup portal, or any of your other internal or external web sites.  To build or customize an application, you will need a basic knowledge of web application development.  To import and deliver existing applications, and offer a personalized portal, you will not need any knowledge of web development.

And we're changing the DataCaster blog to the Data Mashups blog.  We'll cover Applibase Server topics primarily in the Applibase blog.

We're close to opening up the Data Mashups service for a public beta.  Please stay tuned.

We're excited to get our new and improved product in front of users.  And with a new approach to online development.  After the initial preview releases, and the underwhelming response, we've been searching for a better approach to interest early adopters of our technology.  Easy online development with AJAX may be just the thing to interest enterprises trying to derive value from the mountains of data they have.  

It's not just that AJAX is the buzzword of the moment.  The productivity benefits of the new browser-based development tools are just being realized.   As a long time Java developer, I resisted the "wild-west" nature of the whole Javascript, CSS, AJAX, model.  But once I got into it, I've been completely sold on the potential of online development.  We're still figuring things out, but its clear this technology is going places.

This changes everything.  

Applibase products are targeted at enterprise developers, who will need more convincing and proof before they adopt such technology.  Proof that it can be secure, reliable, and much more productive.  We're not there yet, but I'm looking forward to the challenge of getting there.

We're open sourcing our tools, and can see at least two benefits.  For AppliBuilder, the value of the tool depends on good Web components (we're calling them widgets, though the term is now as overused/abused as components).  With open source, we hope a wider set of widgets will emerge, making life easier for enterprise developers.  Only time will tell.

And with DataCaster, we'd like to see people publishing more data online making it easy to access any SQL data you need right from your browser scripts.  Open source should make it easier for users to try out this new technology.  

Welcome to Applibase 2.0 (let's skip 1.0).
Tony G. Thomas
Applibase, Inc.

An interesting (long) writeup on Mashups and the pitfalls that lie ahead.   However it concludes with:

"This will happen. And when it does, mashup technologies are going to do to enterprise applications what the PC did to enterprise computing ? move the solution to the edge where quick and dirty has more value.

This may all sound like I am a Luddite about mashups.   Far from it.  I am bullish as can be...."

While there are a lot of issues with Mashups, many of them seem to be for consumer facing web applications.  We're betting this technology is going to be significant for that long tail of enterprise applications and "do to enterprise applications what the PC did to enterprise computing."