I’ve spent the past few days mulling over the differences between mashups and the more traditional integration that’s done with enterprise applications. My initial reaction? There’s a lot more similarities than differences: in both cases, a third party uses published application interfaces to create functionality that integrates the capabilities of two or more applications/services. I know, that’s a bit of a simplification, but how soon will it be before overly complex (and expensive) enterprise integrations start taking advantage of the lessons to be learned from the mashups of web services?
Obviously, I’m not the only one thinking about this: the ZDNet SaaS blog just posted about enterprise mashups, and what’s needed to make them a reality.
Makes me want to go to MashupCamp.
Sandy,
The notion of composite applications is somewhat similar to what you outline above – the one difference I see is that composite applications are fairly transaction rich (create, update, delete), while a number of the mashups today are primarily read-only.
I think that the notion of composite applications is IDENTICAL to what I outline above, although I agree that many of the popular social-networking mashups today are primarily read-only.
After spending this week at MashupCamp (comment posted Feb 23rd), I believe that the differences between composite applications and mashups are practically indistinguishable.
After visiting MashupCamp last week (this comment posted 26/02/06), I think that’s going to change. The tools and techniques are starting to mature and I believe that the line between enterprise composite applications and internet mashups is to to start to blend.