Mashup Camp 2 Day 2: Internal mashups

Tom Ortega from eBay led a discussion on internal mashups (mashups within closed corporate walls). Like me, he sees mashups and SOA as two ends of the same spectrum, so there were a lot of things that they’re doing internally that are somewhere in between the hair-on-fire mashups that we’re seeing here at camp, and the takes-forever-to-over-architect SOA implementations that are happening in corporations everywhere today. Tom wasn’t talking about eBay’s APIs for mashups that are also being promoted elsewhere at camp; he’s an internal guy developing stuff for their own internal use, nothing to do with the eBay developer program.

To be truthful, a lot of what Tom is talking about is way more SOA/web services/composite applications than mashups, using for the front end, and Java for the middle and back tiers, where Flex is making SOAP web services calls. I asked Tom why he called these mashups instead of composite applications, and he said that the intention is to create a library of web services and other tools, then unleash them on the organization at large to create/assemble whatever they want with them. Definitely a mashup mentality, if not fully lightweight mashup integration methods, which is a great first step to bringing mashups to the enterprise.

The wiki page isn’t there yet, but will probably be here along with a link to Tom’s slides.

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