Home  >  

MIX08 Panel Notes: Challenges and Opportunities of Mashing up the Web

AddThis Social Bookmark Button
microsoftmix.jpg
I'm sitting in on a panel discussion at MIX08 on the Challenges and Opportunities in Mashing up the Web. Panelists include Sam Ramji of Microsoft, Andy Gutmans of Zend Corporation, Shawn Burke, Director, .NET Platform and a developer of the AJAX Control Toolkit, Mike Schroepfer of Mozilla, and Aaron Fulkerson of MindTouch.


The panel has been responding to two questions: What’s been important in making the blossoming of mashups possible, and what are the barriers?

Andy says, Ajax has been key, but had been around for a long time. He notes that it emerged from an enterprise context, but was simplified for use in the consumer world, and is now making its way back into enterprises.

Shawn Burke says the sheer proliferation of services has been important, but what's really driving interest in the mashups is consumers who desire to create their own solutions. The more the mashups happen, the more consumers become interested in exposing their own data. New client technologies like Silverlight, Flash and even Ajax are enabling a new burst of mashup creativity. Another enabler is the fact that the pieces (e.g., YouTube) are getting bigger and more therefore more useable.

Mike notes that REST, iFrames and XMLHTTPRequest have been important drivers and are winning the day over more elaborate initiatives such as WS*.

Aaron says let’s just stick with standards, such as HTTP, JSON, XML, Atom.

What’s holding back mashups? Where are things falling down? Aaron says it's hard for him to be pessimistic since everything seems to be coming together. Pressed on where he's had to "hack around" a service endpoint to make it work, he smiles and says Windows Live has been difficult. “We don't need new standards,” he says, “we just need to continue using the ones we have.”

Mike says mashups are one "ginormous" hack. The big challenge in the end is security. He likes the idea of declarative controls to determine what data gets sent where.

Shawn notes he works for a company that sells tools. He sees REST as a problem because it's hard to build tools for REST endpoints.

JSON is great for communicating state, but it's scary that you're sending code across the internet without confirming that it's only state. The lack of a unified way to identify web services and determine what they offer is his nut to crack. Andy says standards for how gadgets communicate with each other would be valuable.

Aaron believes many business have invested in SOA, but have not seen a return on their investment because there's no way to tie those services together.

A questioner notes the gap between the simplicity of the tools that users are being given -- such as Yahoo Pipes and Popfly. Andy says a really interesting market is that of Excel users who are not developers, but are somewhat technical. If someone gets a tool right for that audience there's millions to be made. Popfly requires someone write a wrapper in order to make a service useable.

Another panelist says the mashup tool for the masses is the classic portal -- such as Pageflakes or iGoogle -- where a user can aggregate feeds, mail, weather gadgets and more.

But what about the elephants in the room: Facebook and OpenSocial, as the ultimate mashup tools?

Read more from John Osborn. John Osborn's Atom feed

Comments

21 Comments

Marta said:

the ASP.NET MVC talk was also very interesting. MVC will live side-by-side with WebForms, and it gives a really clean (java) way to build test-driven web sites. it definitely has a future with us (it's in somewhat early beta now). My Games

hi,
let me say why not a pdf format, why only paperback?. I want to BUY good books yes but in the same time I would like to do something to save nature: less paper use, less pollution, less environmental impact.
I hope you agree. Thanks. saç ekimi

link ekle said:

the ASP.NET MVC talk was also very interesting. MVC will live side-by-side with WebForms, and it gives a good article.
link ekle link ekle

site ekle said:

Another panelist says the mashup tool for the masses is the classic portal -- such as Pageflakes or iGoogle -- where a user can aggregate feeds, mail, weather gadgets and more.
site ekle site ekle

toplis said:

Shawn Burke says the sheer proliferation of services has been important, but what's really driving interest in the mashups is consumers who desire to create their own solutions. The more the mashups happen, the more consumers become interested in exposing their own data. New client technologies like Silverlight, Flash and even Ajax are enabling a new burst of mashup creativity. Another enabler is the fact that the pieces (e.g., YouTube) are getting bigger and more therefore more useable. toplist toplist

Anadolu su deposu

Joseph said:

I read carefully but seems like you had recorded the panelists thoughts properly but your question making me think as well, what about giants like Facebook. Truly interesting discussion

Joseph
-----------
My Page

Steve said:

Interesting insight. I agree with Joseph that my initial thoughts went to the giants. How is mashups going to look in the future with the major internet social moguls.

Steve
-------------
Fort Myers Personal Injury lawyers

Tom said:

These Notes are definitely well laid out and talks about the challenges of mashing up the web rather clearly. Hoping to get this more in a book format though. I'm thinking about the major giants in the industry as well.

-,earth4energy

Jimyy said:

anadolu su deposuuu naber?

Don said:

The more the mashups happen, the more consumers become interested in exposing their own data. New client technologies like Silverlight, Flash and even Ajax are enabling a new burst of mashup creativity.

- commission blueprint

can berber said:

Istanbul City Tours, istanbul tours, private istanbul tours, istanbul sightseeing tours, Istanbul excursions

Istanbu tours, Private Istanbul tours, Istanbu excursions with local guides, privateistanbultour.com


http://www.privateistanbultour.com

can berber said:

Istanbu tours, Private Istanbul tours, Istanbu excursions with local guides,

www.tourstravelturkey.com


TM.com.sa said:

Shawn Burke says the sheer proliferation of services has been important, but what's really driving interest in the mashups is consumers who desire to create their own solutions. The more the mashups happen, the more consumers become interested in exposing their own data. New client technologies like Silverlight, Flash and even Ajax are enabling a new burst of mashup creativity. Another enabler is the fact that the pieces (e.g., YouTube) are getting bigger and more therefore more useable. toplist toplist

I wonder how all of this will be affected by the coming internet 2?

I totally agree with Aaron! They should just stick with the standards. Change is not ALKWAYS good.

ceviri said:

I read carefully but seems like you had recorded the panelists thoughts properly but your question making me think as well, what about giants like Facebook. Truly interesting discussion çeviri hizmetleri çeviri
I hope you agree. Thanks.

canberber said:

Turkey Travel agency, Ephesus Tours, Gallipoli Tours, İstanbul Tours, Cappadocia Tours, Pamukkale Tours


Newyork Tours,Private istanbul tours,Turkish Night Dinner Show, Turkey Tour Package, Turkey Tours,Old city Tour Of Istanbul

http://www.onenationtravel.net

emir said:

İstanbul Tours, Turkey Tours, Cappadocia Tours, Ephesus Tours, Turkey Package Tours

istanbul day tours, istanbul city Tours, Istanbul sightseeing, Turkey Tour, Gallipoli Tours and Anzac tours,

http://www.tourstravelturkey.com

Turkey Tours, İstanbul Tours, Cappadocia Tours, Ephesus Tours, Gallipoli Tours, Pamukkale Tours
istanbul day tours, istanbul city Tours, Istanbul sightseeing, private tours turkey, Turkey Package Tours
http://www.istanbultoursturkey.com

wawanesa said:

What would you say are the challenges for this upcoming year regarding the "mashing up the web?"

Leave a comment


Type the characters you see in the picture above.

Tag Cloud

Poll: Sci-Fi Movies

What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie of All Time?

Vote | View Poll Results | Read Related Blog Entry

Latest Features

  •     Welcome back to the series. This time we are goings to build a really exciting component that will be used to simply display information about the user. Well, you might say why to we need such a component, is there... Continue Reading
  •    Welcome back to our exciting Facebook ActionScript series. In this article we will discuss one of most important (and most exciting) features of the FB platform, it's the publishing of news. We all know when we log in to facebook,... Continue Reading
  • This article provides 10 tips and best practices (in no particular order) for maximizing the benefits that Dojo can bring to your next project. For a more thorough introduction to Dojo, see the article Dojo: The JavaScript Toolkit with... Continue Reading
  •     The notifications are one of the most interesting (and important) parts of the facebook area. In order to completely understand the Flash side of it, we need to understand the basics of the facebook notification, what it is and how... Continue Reading

Development Series

Get an overview of the tools and technologies that work together to allow developers to build Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) quickly and easily.

facebook icon Facebook Application Development

Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA

Recommended for You

@InsideRIA on Twitter

Archives

  • Or, visit our complete archive.  

About This Site

Welcome to the premiere community site for all things RIA sponsored by O'Reilly Media and Adobe Systems Incorporated.