What are "Mash Ups"?

Well, it seems to be up for grabs at the moment. Wikipedia takes a simple approach describing a mashup as a combination of 2 or more services from different providers (i.e., Google maps linked with home sales listings from Craigslist) to create a new web application not provided from any one vendor.

No one is suprised that mashup vendors are popping up all over, and the working definitions of mashup are changing daily.

Ingenuus has been doing mashups for some time now. Our process automation tools are integrated and allow process owners to create their own applications.

Mashups are recently being divided into three broad types: presentation, data and logic.

Presentation Mashups
A presentation mashup is the implest, bringing information from more than one source together into a common user interface.

Data Mashups
The next step is the data mashup, which means extracting data from multiple sources and combining it. The goal is easier access: instead of looking through multiple data-bases, users can query several databases at once, both saving time and enabling more cross-referencing and comparison.

Logic Mashups
Logic mashups are potentially the most complex, always involving programming. They connect two or more applications, automating certain tasks, and include aware-ness of workflow.

Mashups and Ingenuus
In the enterprise, logic mashups overlap with traditional workflow appalications and with the recently popular composit applications cited as the main benefit of SOA. The difference is that traditional workflow applications tend to be focused on a single task, such as supply ordering or expense approvals. Mashups should enable rapid customization and adaptation, letting one platform serve as the basis for multiple tasks, which is what Ingenuus does. Typically these types of solutions are designed for IT people, whereas Ingenuus has created a product designed for process owners.

Client side mashups compete with sever-side SOA orchestration technologies such as BPEL (Business Process Exeecution Language), but that is not obviously stopping large vendors from adopting the mashup approach. Mashups can use SOA, but do not depend on it. In a recent survey nearly two thirds of enterprises that use brower based mashpus have done so without SOA.

Our partnership with Interweave gives Ingenuus the ability to take advantage of SOA without being limited or contrained by it, leaving it to continue to provide multi-task mashups that are truly process enabled. What's best is that this capability is provided to process owners, not IT experts.