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IBM's recent move to support mashups is a strong indicator from the technology giant that Web 2.0 and mashups will continue to dethrone entrenched licensed software and development business models and empower average users with little or no technical expertise:

At IBM's 2008 IMPACT conference being held in Las Vegas this week, the company announced the launch of the IBM Mashup Center, an area where end-user browser-based clients can mash-up widgets to solve-light weight problems.

"This was put together to assist the trend in the marketplace for mashups," said Larry Bowden, vice-president of portals and web interaction services with IBM's Lotus. "It is the fastest growing ecosystem on the web and CIOs are glad that the Web 2.0 trend is beginning to solidify and is looking to larger vendors to help them adopt these technologies in a structured way."

The IBM Mashup Center is about allowing non-technical users in a business to drag and drop mashup components from personal, enterprise and web sources to easily create, deploy and share customized web applications and widgets in minutes.

Bowden added that the IBM Mashup Center will also have a catalogue where all the various company-built, consumer-built or competitor widgets can be found.

The catalogue will have a social networking aspect to it, where users can find descriptions of widgets, comments about them and their ranking.

Bowden explained that the information in the catalogue is populated by taking feeds from department information, personal information or enterprise information.

IBM Mashup Center stores information feeds from enterprise sources in RSS, ATOM or XML formats to maximize the types of information that can be unlocked and remixed. With the ability to merge, transform, filter, annotate or publish information in new formats, the software helps create a single view of disparate sets of information.

The new IBM Mashup Center is powered by intuitive user mashup capabilities from Lotus Mashups, and information access and transformation capabilities provided by IBM InfoSphere MashupHub.

"The IBM Mashup Center is truly an aligned product where multiple teams at IBM have come together to deliver this to the marketplace," said Bowden.

In addition, IBM also announced WebSphere sMash, a dynamic scripting language that allows users to create any type of widget they want and apply it to any website.

"sMash is essentially a platform for deploying Web 2.0 applications and is targeted at Java and PHP developers," said Kareem Yusuf, director of product development of WebSphere sMash. "This is combing a lightweight platform that makes it easy for partners to adopt and build Web 2.0 applications and create widgets that can be leveraged through the IBM Mashup Center."

He added that one of the unique things about WebSphere sMash is that it is being delivered strictly through partners.

According to John Gordon, director of channel marketing of IBM's SOA and WebSphere, sMash was developed out of Project Zero.org.

"It is a channel only beta program to drive sMash development to make sure it is relevant to the channel from day one," said Gordon. He added that so far there have been 283,000 of sMash by business partners and the channel.

"We are taking all of their input to drive features, functions and evaluations that meet their needs."

Marc Thomas-Schmidt, distinguished engineer and chief architect of IBM's Project Zero, added that what sMash addresses is how to take the concept of Web 2.0 and make it relevant to business.

He explained that partners, in particular system integrators, will be using sMash in their service engagements in order to build integrated or custom made solutions for their customers.

A developer's version of WebSphere sMash will continue to be available from Projectzero.org as a free download, while the commercial platform will be sold on a per license basis and will be available in the second quarter.

By: Vanessa Ho

Source: ConnectIT