Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Mashups and EAI

In an interesting article Gregor Hohpe(Google Architect of EIP Fame) describes how EAI patterns and concepts can be used while building mashups.

This to some extent justifies, why major vendors in the EAI space (ex. TIBCO - GI Acquisition) are looking for offerings in this space.

It is not simple to differntiate Mashups from Composite Apps.Conceptually they are the same.Only difference is in their scope.Mashups are often built ad-hoc and then integrated using simple protocols like RSS and Atoms. Mashups are used in the context of Web 2.0. Mashups pull data from different sources, aggregate and transform the data to be used in different contexts.

Mashups: REST/XML,JSON, ad-hoc, bottom-up, easy to change, lowexpectations, built by user

Composite Apps: SOA/WS-*, planned, top-down, more static, (too) highexpectations, built by

If you want to know more about Mashups, have a look at this tutorial from the same author.

Heard of Yahoo Pipes.. . Experiment with it and have fun.

1 comment:

Kevin Hakman said...

TIBCO is actually running a developer contest based on this principle. Check out www.ajaxchallenge.com, a commuity project where you can contribute to building the world's largest mashup and perhaps win some great stuff for great entries.

At the core it uses publish/subscribe interfaces (an EAI principle) to enable the mashup to be an assembly of disparate works integrated toether through the pub/sub strategy. THere's also a write up on the TIBCO PageBus -- an open source client-side message bus for facilitating the pub./sub approach.