Are mashups the lightweight cousin of ETL?
Of IBM's various mashup building tools, Exeed Technologies Jacob Ukelson who attended Mashup Camp Dublin and blogged about it (one of his most trafficked blogs according to him) wrote:
....it is like the mashups are the lightweight cousin of ETL - for display rather than bulk load purposes. It will be interesting to follow and see how ETL tooling and mashup tooling come together at IBM, especially since the both the ETL and mashup tools tools are part of the Data Integration group at IBM....
ETL stands for Extract, Transform & Load and the bulk loading Ukelson mentions is probably a reference to the way ETL runs behind the sceens -- moving data (sometimes in bulk or in batch jobs) from one place to another (often a data warehouse), sometimes massaging it along away. Eventually that data turns up somewhere (on a display or a report) either in detail or as part of a roll-up.
By their very definition, data warehouses could be thought of as mashups. Of course, you're traditional mashup is far more display-oriented and the ability for them to bulk process largley depends on where the code is being executed (client vs. server). Client-side Javascript-driven mashups are not as well suited to stored-procedure like iterations on databased data which is why they often marry related items from disparate resources one record at a time as Ukelson says, for display purposes.
But server-side mashups (often powered by scripting languages like PHP) whose end result is still display-oriented could handle the sorts of roll-ups that might normally be driven off data warehouse queries.
If ETL and mashups are simply dots along the spectrum of integration, what are the others and where do they lie?