The Presto Mashup platform is all about bridging the gap between the users and the data. Presto provides Developers with the right set of tools to build these bridges in the form of APIs for Java, JavaScript, ActionScript, Flash/Flex, C# and VBA. In this article, I will walk through a sample that uses the Presto-ExtJS integration library.

Ext JS is a leading Javascript framework for building Cross-browser Rich Internet Applications. While the Presto Developer Edition APIs are open and not tied to any specific Javascript framework, we provide an integration library for Ext JS to make it easy for Ext JS developers to quickly integrate Presto in their applications.

Screenshot of the sample

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[Cross-posted from my personal blog]
I came across this interesting post: How Mashups Could Eliminate Integration Projects by Loraine Lawson. In a related post, she refers to John Crupi's article Enterprise Mashups Part I: Bringing SOA to the People which I would recommend to readers who want to understand JackBe's take on defining mashups. Anyway, Loraine's post led me to Ron Schmelzer's ZapFlash. Here are some excerpts of Ron's article that caught my eye, with my take on them.

Excerpt from ZapFlash:

A year or two ago, assuming that a mashup was a web browser-based, static, user interface composition of web-based functionality would be a reasonable presumption. But in the enterprise context, none of those assumptions necessarily hold – we might want non-Web access to mashed applications, we might want to change them regularly, and we might want to mash up information that exists below the user interface abstraction. For sure, Web mashups might embody the ideals of the original mashup concept, but we now have the desire to mash up a wide variety of IT resources from application to infrastructure to data that might be exposed with a wide range of interfaces – or without. And, it’s the desire to mash up information freed from the application that diversifies the mashup term to include the concept of the data mashup.

My take: This hits the point right on what we at JackBe have been saying all along about mashups. While some mashups are done purely in the UI/Browser, in the enterprise, such mashups need to be supported by a new tier, the mashup tier, which sits between the presentation and business tier. So enterprise mashups will have some mashing done in the client, but most of the mashing happens in server side where security, governance, policies can be applied before any mashing can happen in the client. [Read More...]

Much has been written about the synergy between mashups and SOA (we rcapped a lot of it in a recent blog).  Mike Kavis at Toolbox.com has gone one step further and added mashups into the SOA-enabled enterprise archietcture.  

Here's the setup: 

We want to hide the complexity of our architecture from the end user and expose data services to them to consume. At the same time we want these mashups to be equally secure as the services we write and adhere to the same governing principles. Enterprise mashup products provide tools to make managing this layer easy and efficient.

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