I thought that InfoWorld knocked it out of the park with this article on "Enterprise Mashups" by Galen Gruman. Yes, they are hosting this blog, so what of it? :-)

With the advent of rich client and extensible interfaces such as AJAX, we now have the ability to quickly create mashups to solve specific business problems using standard dynamic interfaces that front services. Mashups are powerful ways of taking existing applications and services, and creating something even more useful for business.

However, I think that there are really two types of mashups emerging: visual and non-visual.

Visual mashups, are mashups we are more than aware of today as we mash Google Maps with a sex offender database, or a real time stock ticker with a portfolio manager. The value is there, we take two different interfaces and create something that is more useful than the two separate applications, kind of a 1+1=3 thing. Clearly, this is the "sex on the screen" aspect of SOA and mashups. We’re bound to so a ton of these in the near future, if not already.

Non-visual mashups are the mashing up of two or more services to create a combined application, or integration point, to service a business process. What's unique here is that they may not externalize anything to a user interface. For instance, mashing up a stream of customer addresses with an address validation service, or mashing up a stream of social security numbers with a credit check service. Each non-visual mashup, perhaps, is sending exceptions off to another stream or queue for processing later, or perhaps to other mashups. This is very simple, and I bet you can think of even more complex and valuable non-visual mashups for your own enterprise.

Truth-be-told, while visual mashups are cool and useful, I think that non-visual mashups will be more valuable to business as time goes on. So, if you’re mashing stuff up remember to consider the non-visual with the visual, as well as how this all works in the context of your SOA.

Posted by Dave Linthicum on July 28, 2006 01:20 PM