IBM's new suite, which includes Mashup Center and WebSphere sMash, aims to make it easier for both developers and information workers to create and use mashups. Mashup Center includes Mashup Hub, which acts as a catalog to register feeds of information available for use in mashups, and Lotus Mashups, which allows even nontechnical employees to merge, filter, or publish information in those feeds into new mashups. Lotus Mashups follows in the footsteps of Microsoft's Popfly and Yahoo Pipes, but is aimed specifically at enterprises, unlike those two.
The other half of the suite, WebSphere sMash, formerly known as Project Zero, is a development environment aimed at enterprise developers. WebSphere sMash supports dynamic scripting languages like PHP and employs REST and can be used to create an application that mashes up disparate Web and server- or client-based information as well as to create the actual user interfaces for those applications.
Mashups have yet to prove themselves widely, Gartner analyst Gene Phifer said in an interview. "It's unproven, especially in mission-critical use cases," he said. "A lot of organizations are therefore still not ready to take the risk there."
In addition to a market that's just starting to form, Phifer said security concerns and the risk of poorly designed mashups make some companies wary. Mashups typically don't have any inherent security, instead relying on the existing security of the sites and applications that are being mashed, so security becomes a bit of a black box unless mashups are enveloped in their own security wrapper. But that defeats the purpose of the quick, dirty, and easy combination of information inherent in many mashups.
With some of the consumer-oriented mashup tools, Phifer said, end users can very easily create inefficient mashups. For example, if looking for a piece of information that it can't find, a badly designed mashup might create an endless loop of server requests that could quickly overwhelm a Web server.
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