Jon Ferraiolo works for IBM but works more or less full time heading up the OpenAjax Alliance. Ajax is the power behind mashups, and because mashups take components from different suppliers, interoperability, and therefore the work of the OpenAjax Alliance, is critical.

IBM quickly recognized the importance of defining an agile, open source industry group to defined standards for the industry.

The key concepts behind Web 2.0 are community, collaboration, user experience, and user generated content. Going beyond user-generated content, mashups allow the creation of user-generated applications.

Mashups are about self-service application development, enabling organizations to move to the next level of innovation, speed, and agility by allowing users to combine and remix different sets of data in new ways. In this way, mashups can provide insight into corporate data that was simply not possible before.

Many people are unclear about the difference between mashups and portals (including Jon). Portals typically provide a predefined set of mini applications or widgets. Mashups allow users to reach outside the organization and combine external feeds with existing data sources to create their own widgets and personlized dashboards.

IBM has developed several technology platforms to assist in the creation of mashups and widgets:

• Mashup hub
• QED wiki (screencast here)

These technologies are being fed into IBM’s commercial application Lotus Mashups which enables instant deployment of custom mashup widgets (which Jon described as “prepackaged application components”).

IBM of course is not the only company developing and producing widgets and mashup technology. The amount of innovation going on in the mashup/widget space is extraordinary. However, this also represents one of the biggest challenges facing the industry: interoperability.

The Open Ajax Alliance is working to create the Open Ajax Metadata wrapper standard, as well as open source transcoders for various proprietary widget formats to allow different mashup technologies to work together easily.

The other major challenge of course is security. IBM and the Open Ajax Alliance are developing and promoting a secure runtime environment for mashups, that is being dubbed, appropriately, “SMASH” (for Secure Mashups).

Tags: Ajax, IBM, Jon Ferraiolo, Lotus Mashups, QED Wiki, SMASH

Posted by Stuart Culshaw in Dialog 08, Dialog day 2. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.