Mashing Up Multiple Web Services

GMGruman writes "Ted Samson reports on a new Web application dubbed ifttt.com that mashes up all those Web services we routinely use. Today's Web is brimming with a staggering number of services where users can speak their mind (Twitter), grab vital information (any news or blog source), store important files (Dropbox or Box.net), collaborate with peers (Facebook or Google+), and much more. The dream has long been to devise ways to get these often disparate and siloed services to interact with one another, creating something greater than the sum of its parts. It serves as a measure of how far we've come from the early days of specialized, single-purpose mashups, or more complicated SOAs where services were cobbled together with complex tools and the coding equivalent of duct tape."

Comments

Quit calling web applications web services.

[RightSaidFred99]

It's confusing. I assumed it was a web service that somehow aggregated the interfaces of all these other web services. My immediate response was "Well, that's pointless. Why wouldn't I do that in my own code - that's what a web service is for.".

Only to go on and read that it's not a web service.

Re:Quit calling web applications web services.

[luis_a_espinal]

It's a service which is offered over the web. Isn't that the very definition of a web service? However, what this is not is a mashup. It doesn't recombine content, but offers functionality across services.

No. There are several (not necessarily equivalent) definitions of what a web service is, but they have, at their core, define a web service as a function or functionality that one can invoke programmatically (and that was designed with this in mind) over an IP-based protocol in general, and over HTTP in particular, either way exploiting, relying and/or being affected by the characteristics, positive and negative, of the so-called Internet architecture.

What it is being reported here is a web-based application (not a web service) that aggregates information from other web-based applications using web services provided by the later. So RightSaidFred99 is pretty much correct in voicing his objection for calling a web application a web service.

One can understand a non-tech reporter making such a confusion. But, in a supposedly tech-savvy site such as slashdot, I can only think what the fuck? We are not in the eras that preceded the widespread adoption of Internet technology, and it's not like web services are something new either.

Re:Um. Hooray?

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't looked through all the channels, but at least the services that support it (Facebook, Google stuff) are using OAuth so you can authorize a third party to perform actions or get data from your account in a way that can be revoked at any time without giving them your credentials.

BTDT...stop with the "new" already.

[geekmux]

"Ted Samson reports on a new Web application..."

Ah, "new"? Where the hell has he been the last 5 years? Under a rock?

Facebook "Like" buttons popping up everywhere, Google map links embedded into every web interface and email program, practically Internet-wide single-sign-on capability with far too many websites acting as proxy authenticators to all of the major accounts (Google, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc.)

Tweetdeck, Trillion, Adium...the list goes on and on. There's nothing "new" about yet another program to "mash-up" the 17 accounts that everyone seems to have in yet another effort to create a single visual aggregator of endless streams of crap that you probably would have never had a reason to know your 4,471th "friend" said or did in the first place, yet somehow feel the undying pressure to get plugged in and monitor such nonsense with an almost childish infatuation to refresh it all every 14 seconds.