Are Enterprise Mashups a Fad or the Future?
The main page of John Musser’s excellent Mashup Feed site enumerates the average creation rate of brand-new offerings, presently showing there are 3.17 new mashups created every day. The implication, says Enterprise 2.0 and social computing expert Dion Hinchcliffe, is clearly that “something momentous is happening.”
But are mashups a fad or the future? In his influential “Enterprise Web 2.0″ blog for ZDNet, Hinchcliffe recently ventured some predictions for the coming ‘mashosphere’ – after first noting that an important underlying reason for the mashup phenomenon “is the advent of Web 2.0 concepts that encourage software creators to expose their applications as sets of reusable services.”
In Hinchcliffe’s view, mashups are significant within the enterprise “because mashups have the potential to deliver zero-footprint, Web-based business applications much faster, cheaper, more reusably, and more maintainable than ever before.”
He concedes that mashups are a disruptive technology, meaning that they are a genuine threat to the old way of doing things:
“This may very well mean that slow adopters are the never adopters, because they’re cancelled, put to pasture, given special projects, or what-have-you. Fast-moving folks with good mashup tools and a vast landscape of services can punch out 10 smaller applications that not only do what your old creaky ways of building software did, but are in turn reusable and composable.”
But Hinchcliffe is realistic, too. “Whether it’s the explosion of uncontrollable dependencies, vicious dependency cycles, scalability issues, privacy problems or some other side-effect of high levels of somewhat ad-hoc integration, mark my words there will be significant growing pains.” [Source: Social Computing Mag]
