My Learnings - Markish Personal Blog

    Heard this buzz word, If yes, you can rate yourself ‘up-to-date geek’. If not, read on, still in the end of this post you can rate yourself so. Even this post is late by quite some time months since this word came into prominence. Before talking about Mashup, I’d take an analogy to explain.

    Probably most of us are aware what an Operating System (OS) is and what it mean to the overlying applications. Probably it exposes numerous APIs to interact with the underlying hardware resources. The overlying applications just call the APIs to access the Hardware resources. But for the OS in place there, programming would have been a nightmare even now. A simple explanation would be

    In the above picture, it’s clear that, the user applications just make use of the APIs provided by the OS to get access to whatever resources it want to access. But for this infrastructure, it’s really tough to have even a small application program running and we’d not have the comfort of so many high-level programming languages.

    Now coming back to the original discussion, Mashup or Mashup application make use of the similar infrastructure available over the internet. They make use of the services from different websites / service providers and provide altogether completely different service which is more useful and powerful in the end-user perspective. Something like

    A Mashup application or website may be defined as “An application that consumes the output of more than one service and ‘mash’ them up to provide a new service to the end user”. Let’s discuss a typical example. When we impose the data from http://weather.com over the map data provided by Google maps, we get a altogether rich user interface displaying the weather of a particular region along with the forecasts. Something likehttp://www.weatherbonk.com.

Now Mashups have opened a new set of applications that can provide the end user the flexibility and the benefits of more than one service providers. There are hundreds of Mashups already in place. Mashups can also find a very big market in the Enterprise world as well. In my next post I’ll discuss something interesting Mashups and procedure to create a new Mashup.

Tags: Internet, Markish, Mashup, Web 2.0

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 and is filed under Internet Technology, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.