< side note - Ok, I admit the title of this post is a tad on the dorky side, but who doesn’t love a good alliteration every now and again?? >
Mashups and mainframes. To some, this might seem like an awkward marriage of old and new. In reality, it is a combination that can deliver a significant amount of business value. Using tools like Rational® Host Access Transformation Services (HATS), green screen information can be extracted and wrapped into an ATOM feed. Once wrapped into a feed, all sorts of magic can happen:
--- New composite applications can be created that combine the mainframe data with other data sources, saving business users time by alleviating the need to switch between multiple application screens. --- Modern, rich, browser-based interfaces can now be built on top of the existing mainframe data sources. --- Reuse, reuse, reuse!. Help increase the return on your existing investments by reusing those mainframe data streams in new ways.
If you want to learn more about this, I encourage you to check out an article on this topic that some of my colleagues just published. The article describes the steps needed to create a mashup that pulls in information from a green screen 3270 mainframe application.
Enterprise 2.0 is coming up very soon - June 22nd, to be exact. If anyone is going to the conference and wants to meet some of the Mashup Center team, please stop by our booth (#504). We'd love to talk with you!
In addition, IBM is going to be a part of several sessions and panel discussions. The one I am personally most interested in is called Socializing Enterprise Portals. It will cover the topic of how portals fit into an enterprise 2.0 world, and how portals should integrate with social applications. This session features my boss Larry Bowden (VP, Portals and Mashups) on the panel, as well as a VP of product management from Oracle. It is moderated by Mike Gotta Principle Analyst at the Burton Group.
To learn more about IBM's presence at enterprise 2.0., you can learn more here.
We just finished a plug-in for Microsoft Excel that let's you import your feeds from the Mashup Center catalog into any spreadsheet. Once the data is in your spreadsheet, you can refresh it whenever you want. Go here to get the new plug-in: http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/imh4excel
This enables a "round trip" work-flow from spreadsheets to Mashup Center to spreadsheets.
For example, a finance department could do quarterly roll-ups programmatically: 1) Analysts feed their spreadsheet-based work into Mashup Center's catalog. 2) The Data Mashup Builder "crunches" the inputs into a svelte, "only what's needed" Quarterly Report Feed 3) The Quarterly Report Feed is used for real-time presentation from within the Mashup Builder environment. 4) The Quarterly Report Feed is exported to a master Quarterly Report spreadsheet for dissemination.
This model ensures fewer human errors from spreadsheet cut/paste errors, shorter cycle-time getting Quarterly Reporting completed, more insightful consumption of Quarterly Data.
Let us know if you have any questions!
Mark
Special thanks to our jStart Emerging Technologies team for this new addition to IBM's Enterprise Mashup portfolio: - John Feller is a Senior Software Engineering Manager with the IBM jStart Emerging Technologies development team in Research Triangle Park, NC, USA. - Vladimir Stemkovski is an IT Architect with the IBM Emerging Internet Technologies, Customer Innovation Team in Research Triangle Park, NC, USA. - Dzmitry Kazakevich, Software Developer for IBM in Minsk, Belarus.
As promised in my last post, here is a new movie I created showing how to create a widget in WebSphere sMash, and then deploy that widget to IBM Mashup Center.
For those of you too busy to watch the video, let me give you the high level points on sMash. It is a dynamic scripting environment targeted at scripting developers. It comes with a very lightweight runtime and a set of browser-based tools. From a Mashup Center perspective, we think sMash is a great tool for PHP or groovy script developers that need to create custom widgets for their mashups.
I just got back from WebSphere Impact. It was a really great conference – lots of interest and good discussions on mashups. As I mentioned earlier, I presented with Stephan Hesmer in a session on widget creation. As part of that session, I demo’ed creating a widget with both WebSphere sMash and also Lotus Widget Factory.
For those not able to make Impact, I’ve recorded the Widget Factory part of my presentation and embedded it below. I will try and record the sMash one soon and post it as well.
Yea! What does this mean? Well, we have just released a no-charge Mashup Center Amazon Machine Instance (AMI) for development purposes. (An Amazon Machine Instance is just like a virtual machine that contains a full install of IBM Mashup Center.) By no charge, I mean IBM doesn't charge you anything. However, to use this AMI, you do have to pay Amazon EC2 usage charges - which are actually pretty cheap, starting at 10 cents per hour. To give you an idea of how cheap it is, one of our developers who has been spending his time creating and deploying and testing this AMI over the past month or so has maybe racked up about 20 USD in charges.
Later this year- hopefully in August - we plan to roll out the production ready AMI that can be purchased on an hourly (pay-as-you-go) basis.
Why is this cool? Well, a few things: 1- As part of our relationship with Amazon, we have worked out a "bring your own license"deal, where customers can take their existing IBM licenses and use them on the Amazon EC2. Customers then get their Mashup Center going relatively cheaply- without expending a whole bunch of cash up front on hardware.
2- The development AMI is blazing fast. To me, it feels even faster than running Mashup Center on my local machine. This is great for evaluations, testing purposes, prototyping, and even demos. I'm pretty excited for us to get our own demo version of an AMI up and running. 3- Once we get the production AMIs going, EC2 will be a great low cost, quick start up option for our customers - especially those that want to test out the software or have a flexible environment for creating situational apps.
The second part of the strategy is to expand our addressable market. Here you can see the initial usage hours for sMash and Portal for the development AMIs. So we are up to almost 4k hours of usage a month for portal.
Just a quick one.. If anyone is interested in watching some customer testimonials for IBM Mashup Center, then navigate over to the Mashup Center home page to check out the two new customer testimonials that we posted-- one for Kapsch CarrierCom and one for Cardiff University.
One of my favorite – and arguably one of the most powerful features - in Mashup Center is its ability to support syndication of information. Syndication can be both at the presentation layer and the data layer.
At the data layer, we can generate feeds (RSS + Atom) for a wide range of information sources. These feeds can then be easily consumed by any reader that understands the RSS or ATOM protocols.
At the presentation layer, we have a nice feature called embedding that will generate a bit of HTML script for a mashup page or widget. This script can then be pasted into any web page – which could be a wiki, blog, WebSphere Portal page, Content portlet, static HTML, Sharepoint Portal, and even into the Google Gadget editor. The net result is that Mashup Center can be used as a rapid application development environment for widgets or mashup pages. These pages/widgets can then be embedded into whatever web application you wish to run it in.
Want to see how this is done? I just finished a short video showing how to embed mashup pages and widgets. In this scenario, I embed both a widget and a page into Microsoft Sharepoint.
Ok, so Mark and I are not really good at blogging. Perhaps that what was too obvious a statement to even type (since my last blog was end of November and it is now almost May!).. but it was somewhat cathartic to just admit it up front.
Anyhow, over the past several weeks, just when I thought I would retire from the blogging business, a few folks mentioned to me that they found some of my posts interesting. Renewed with self-confidence, I’ve decided to take another stab at this. My goal is to write more often than the spammers write comments in this blog… Well, maybe that is too aggressive. Perhaps I will just commit to writing at least once every two weeks.
That being said, what did we miss over these past several months? Well, too much to really catch up on in detail. Here are the cliff notes:
We had an amazing Lotusphere with lots of sessions, slick demos, and of course interested customers!
We released a portlet on the Portal catalog that will let you run widgets in Portal- even wiring widgets and portlets together.
We had a tiny little update release in January, where we officially rolled out our Feed Control Module to Mashup Center v1.1, which delivers capabilities like rate limiting, IP blocking, and policies.
We received the 2008 Tech Innovator award from VarBusiness. Pretty cool! We also continue to get great press on our product and really good reviews, like this one from Intelligent Enterprise.
The cool little video we created describing what mashups are in web terms won an industry award for our Agency that created it (Outstanding Rich Media Online Ad for the Internet Advertising Competition Awards 2009).
etc. etc. etc.
Now we are about to head to Vegas next week for WebSphere Impact. I think we have 7 or so sessions. In case anyone reading this is going, allow me to plug a few of my sessions:
TPE-2183A How to Develop Widgets in IBM Mashup Center: Concepts and Guidelines
05/05/2009 1:30 pm - 2:45 pm San Polo 3503 (this is a bit geeky, but I will be demonstrating Widget creation using Lotus Widget Factory and WebSphere sMash. My partner in crime, Stephan Hesmer will do the uber-geeky content.
INT-1918A Mash, Grow, and Prosper - How Kapsch Extends Telco services in Mashups
05/04/2009 3:45 pm - 5:00 pm Marco Polo 704 (I will be presenting with a gentleman from Kapsch)
That’s it for now.. more tomorrow. I have a new video I plan to post and write up..
--Nicole
When folks first start to learn about Mashup Center, one of the first questions that typically comes up is "How does Mashup Center relate to WebSphere Portal?" or "When do I use Mashup Center and when do I use Portal?".
For some reason, it never occurred to me to blog about this, and send people the link, rather than having to type up a quick response each time! So here goes -- my 1 minute version of how IBM Mashup Center and Portal relate:
To begin, IBM Mashup Center and WebSphere Portal are complementary products. WebSphere Portal is a platform used by IT to develop, manage, and deploy applications that are often strategic, mission critical, or need high levels of governance. For example, Portal is commonly used to build large intranets, e-commerce sites, or employee, customer, or partner self-service applications. WebSphere Portal has all the necessary features included to build and maintain these types of applications, including content management, fine-grained access control, attribute-based personalization, site management features, etc.
Once a Portal has been deployed, IT wants to ensure that it performs well and it is highly available. As such, they tend to “lock down” the Portal, and prohibit activities such as any and all users being able to create and delete pages.
This is where IBM Mashup Center comes in. IBM Mashup Center allows users (with even very limited abilities) to create quick applications that meet very specific business needs. In IBM, we often call these types of quick apps “situational applications”. With IBM Mashup Center, users with less technical skills can quickly build and share applications that might serve only a small team or even just one individual. In essence, Mashup Center allows organizations to un-bury themselves from their application backlog, and to satisfy the "long tail" of applications (see picture below).
One unique capability IBM brings to the table is that Mashups created in IBM Mashup Center can be seamlessly embedded in WebSphere Portal. As a result, Mashup Center can be used as an environment where new applications or even application prototypes can be quickly built. If one of these mashups becomes highly utilized or mission critical, customers can choose to then push that mashup into the Portal environment, where IT can maintain it.
