Five minutes to develop an application? Way too slow
Would you entrust your enterprise operations to an application built in five minutes? (Okay, ten minutes, counting testing and quality assurance.)
IBM just posted a release pertaining to a keynote speech by Rod Smith, vice president of emerging Internet technologies, who declared that the technologies underpinning blogs, wikis and innovative sites such as Google Maps and Wikipedia on the Web will transform the way productivity applications are developed -- in some cases in as little as five minutes. End-users (businesspeople, not just developers) will be able to use the palette of Web 2.0 components available for free on the Internet.
Never one to miss a trend, IBM unveiled a new mashup prototype, based on Web 2.0 technologies, designed for enterprise computing. IBM's so-called 'Enterprise Mashup' is a framework that uses Web services and wiki technology.
A number of IBM folks have been pursuing this vision for the past few months. In February, I reported on Bob Zurek's proposal for "Enterprise Mashup Services," where companies "will combine information from enterprise search engines, web services, messaging systems, business intelligence engines and data integration solutions and combine that information from external services from their partners and emerging external data sources." In April, ZDNet reported on IBM's vision for five-minute application development by non-technical folks using lightweight scripting languages. The idea, Smith said at the time, was that "businesspeople can create their own Web pages by dragging and dropping components onto a pallet."
IBM's Enterprise Mashup blends external information and Web-based services (e.g., news feeds, weather reports, maps, traffic conditions and more) with enterprise content and services, instantly mashing them together to create a fast application for specific business needs.
"We are seeing growing interest by businesses for Enterprise Mashups, which are driving a whole new breed of 'instant applications' by people needing specific and tailored information," Smith said. "This is about how you empower more people to link applications and information together, helping solve problems in real time. Web 2.0 pioneers are demonstrating the potential of Mashups through their innovative thinking. During the next two years, all middleware vendors will have mash up makers in their product portfolio -- why let all the Web 2.0 folks have all the fun?"