Mashup is a Type Of Repetition

Introduction

A mashup is a web application that uses content from more than one source to create a single new service displayed in a single graphical interface. For example, you could combine the addresses and photographs of your library branches with a Google map to create a map mashup (Figure 1.). The term mashup originally comes from pop music, where people seamlessly combine music from one song with the vocal track from another-thereby mashing them together to create something new. Mashups have recently exploded on the web, for two main reasons. First, many of the major internet companies, such as Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com), Google (www.google.com), and Amazon (www.amazon.com), have opened up their data to be used with other data sources without a lengthy licensing negotiation. In just a minute or two, you can set up and use the data resources they make available.The other reason for this rapid growth is the advent of new tools that make creating mashups easy for anyone, regardless of their technical know-how.

Analysis

Mashups are still relatively new to the technology world, but little by little, it seems they are picking up steam among enterprise businesses. While their definitions are still somewhat shadowy and standards are still quite a ways off, mashups are defined in some generally accepted ways: presentation, process and data mashups. J. Jeffrey Hanson, author of Mashup Patterns: Designs and Examples for the Modern Enterprise, describes the three main categories:

Presentation mashups: A presentation layer mashup deals mainly with user interface artifacts, Hanson said. Alot of things that can be created with widgets, JavaScript, HTML snippets, DOM manipulation and that sort of thing. Process mashups: These are more of an IT operation, with inter-process communication and message queues. It's more of a traditional source code integration.

Data mashups: Mashups that are integrated at the data level, whether it's integrating files, databases, external Web service APIs.

These categories were also noted by companies providing mashups, including Serena and JackBe. No doubt as mashups continue to evolve, these three categories will intertwine, and we will likely even see other forms of mashups being spawned. When asked what the challenges are in bringing mashups to the enterprise level, Hanson said ensuring privacy and making sure data and identities are secure can be the most tricky parts. Additionally, governance needs to be addressed right away because mashups are a public model with company information exposed in the public realm.

Popular Mashups

The most popular type of mashup is a map mashup. Map mashups make up 36 percent of the mashups tracked by ProgrammableWeb (www.programmableweb.com), the most comprehensive listing of mashups. Figure 2 shows the distribution of mashups by type.

Other types of popular mashups mix video and photos. For example, the Viral Video Chart (viralvideochart.unrulymedia.com) site tracks YouTube (www.youtube.com), MySpace (www.myspace.com), and Google Video (video.google.com) in order to identify the most talked about new clips, overall and by category (Figure 3). There are many wonderful mashup services built using photos.

Here are three examples to spark your imagination:

1. color in a ...