Mashups: The next major new application development model?

Posted by: Joseph Ottinger on May 17, 2007 DIGG

The Web continues to drive the evolution of innovation in software these days with REST challenging SOAP, RSS challenging notions of traditional content silos, and widgets putting a easily consumable, visual "face" on our service-oriented architectures. Our services and even our back-end functionality is getting increasingly atomized and made portable. In fact, the rise of widgets, gadgets, and badges on the Web is facilitating the low-barrier integration of very high value functionality into their Web apps in literally just a few minutes by almost anyone.

This trend of ad hoc remixing services and content into new Web apps has been dubbed "mashups" and has generated over 2,000 major new Web apps alone in the last couple of years according to Programmable Web. Users are even doing this themselves en masse in their own blogs, wikis, and social networking profiles proving both the ease of use and dramatically driving the demand for Web parts that can be integrated with little more than a cut-and-paste.

Are we witnessing a sea change in consumption of server-side services, integration models, and the rise of a new high speed, agile application development model? It appears so and the do-it-yourself era of software might be upon us as the Web turns into a sort of giant Home Depot of off-the-shelf parts and services. Not sure this is true? Check out the thousands of ready-to-use components available at WidgetBox, most of them connected to back-end Web services to provide functionality.

Over at ZDNet, the new article "Mashups: The next major new application development model? " explores the challenges and major market opportunities in what might be a generational change in our apps.


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