Let's Mash! Get the Presto Developer Edition now!

Let's Mash! [I wanna hear David Bowie sing that!]
I am excited! We are excited! You see, today is a very special day for us developers at JackBe. We are putting all the work we have been doing over the last 2 years into the hands of the person most important to us - you, the mashup developer! I am happy to announce that we are making the Presto Developer Edition available to everyone for FREE to download and develop enterprise mashups! We are now empowering even more developers to free themselves from some conventional problems they have been dealing with by using, developing, deploying and applying the concept of enterprise mashups.

What's in it for me, did you say? 

Well, you get the award winning enterprise mashup platform for free. And you get to try some new stuff and build cool things (mashups & mashlets) with it allowing you to expand your capabilities in the mashup area and at the same time benefitting you to solve a problem you been itching to solve in your enterprise or group. This is a  risk-free way to experience mashups and join a new growing community.

What's in the developer edition?
Well, for starters, it packs in all our enterprise mashup technology into one easy to use package. You might want to tune in to my brief introduction to Presto for a high-level overview. I sometimes describe Presto as the quickest way between you and your data, whether you are an end-user or a developer like me. After you use it, you will see my point, I hope.

There are many innovative features that are useful to me as a developer that are packed into Presto:

1. A real enterprise mashup server that can consume any kind of data and services with a point-click-consume approach for WSDL, REST, RSS, Atom, Database, Excel, and Web clipping.
2. A dynamic and declarative XML-based Domain Specific Language specifically designed from the ground up exclusively for...(drumroll)...Mashups! This language is called Enterprise Mashup Markup Language (EMML).
3. A browser-based visual mashup composer called Wires, using which you can visually wire data and services to create a mashup!
4. An Eclipse-based Mashup Studio IDE for serious butt-kicking EMML mashup development (yes, with debugger, code completion, XPath support and all that) 
5. A rich set of SDKs for Java, JavaScript, ActionScript, Flash/Flex, C# and VBA to provide connectivity for a wide range of clients.
6. Connectors to integrate with any Portal Servers (supports WSRP/JSR-168), Excel (publish/subscribe to mashups), HP SOA Systinet.

And finally, a word about the language. EMML is a core technology in Presto is very near and dear to us all. EMML was conceived and built as a pure-play mashup technology, and not some pre-existing solution re-packaged to leverage yet another terminology. Coming from our background (many of us are ex-Sun, ex-eBay folks at JackBe), we realized early that we could build all kinds of snappy tools and gizmos for mashups or we could provide the one most powerful tool into the hands of the user. To us, a language is more powerful than any other tool, wizard, application you can give to me as a developer. We have heard many good things about EMML from those that have used it. And with this release of the Presto developer edition, we hope this awesome technology reaches the hands of more and more developers like you and provides you a new way of solving some tough problems in the "enterprise" (no company too small) using mashups. So, please join us here and join us in extending the understanding, reach, use and improvement of mashups.

If you have any questions about Presto or anything the Presto team can do to help you use it, improve your experience with it, please drop us a line here (blog/forum) on this Mashup Developer Community.

Mash On!