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What it Means to be a Mashup
An anonymous reader writes "IBM DevWorks has provided us with an introductory article that helps define what it means to be a mashup. In addition to just defining what a mashup really is the author also delves into what they do for the community at large and where they may take us in the near future. From the article: 'Mashups are an exciting genre of interactive Web applications that draw upon content retrieved from external data sources to create entirely new and innovative services. They are a hallmark of the second generation of Web applications informally known as Web 2.0.'"
Okay, I award this article 8 out of 10 on the 'Web 2.0 buzzword bingo waste of my precious time scale', which I just invented for that express purpose.
However, there is scope for something interesting here. The 'Web 2.0' thing, and I'm including most of the 'semantic web' in that, is the first example of a groupthink disaster growing and evolving from nothing in the web age. I know there were a few silly ideas (set-top boxes and the like) before, but Web 2.0 has grown in a truly organic grass-roots fashion and could provide valuable insights into why sensible people collectively influence each other to make mistakes.
I'm not volunteering to read through the history of Web 2.0 articles to do that, though, I must admit.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
I'm sure I'll get plenty of eye rolling here (and buzzword bingo points), but they are not quite the same thing. While a portal is indeed an aggregation of content, a mashup is a blending of services. I would say that the main distinction is that current Portal products (with a capital P) typically do their aggregation on the server, and spit out the results client side using static HTML pages. While there may be some exceptions, the big ones all currently work in this way. In contrast, mashups work using client-side technologies (JavaScript/Flash) to allow the services to interact without calling for a new HTML page.