Mashups Are Breaking the Mold at Microsoft
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Although it is not yet widely visible to the outside world, some people inside Microsoft are beginning to break that mold.
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OPEN SOURCE champion Microsoft is expanding its programme to give government organisations some of its source code. In a communique from the lair of the Vole, in Redmond, spinsters have said that Microsoft
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New .mobi and .jobs, a shift in the ownership of .net
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No one would have believed me if I had said five years ago that Microsoft would have a page on its Web site called âOpen Source at Microsoftâ with the following remarkably sane and reasonable statement on the subject: Microsoft is focused on helping customers and partners succeed in a heterogeneous technology world. This starts with participating and contributing to a broad range of choices for developing and deploying software, including open source approaches and applications. From thousands of lines of code and scripts on MSDN and TechNet, to open source applications like IronPython, ASP.NET AJAX, SharePoint Learning Kit, and WiX on CodePlex and SourceForge, Microsoft is continually growing the number of products released with open source access.  That's right: Microsoft has released not one but several pieces of code as open source.  Moreover, it's submitting some of its home-grown licences to the Open Source Initiative  for approval.  So what is going on here?
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"Mash" lets people create profiles for their friends and modify their profile.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft's Popfly technology for building mashups is now available in a public beta that allows users to publish applications built on it directly to the popular Facebook social-networking site.
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Take a closer look at the four apps -- Expression Web, Expression Design, Expression Media and Expression Blend -- that make up Microsoft's new design suite.
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(InfoWorld) - Google touted on Thursday its building-block approach for application development, which features mashups and open source software. Mashups link different Internet applications to form a new application. They are becoming the model for developers to build applications, said Jeff Huber, Google vice president of engineering, during a keynote presentation at the Google Developer Day 2007 event in San Jose, Calif. Other building blocks in the company's application development model include ads and standards, Huber said. Google expects developers will use technologies such as a MySQL database, a Linux OS, and programming languages such as Ruby, Python, or PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). "By being able to leverage these building blocks, youâre able to create amazing applications [in] probably a tenth the time," as was previously possible, Huber said. Google with its developer tools seeks to make the Web better; this may result in boosting traffic to the Google home page but not necessarily, according to Sundar Pichai, Google director of product management. The newly announced Google Gears project, for example, involves an extension to make Web applications work offline, Pichai noted. "To us, we believe we benefit, users benefit, and everyone benefits if the Web works better," Pichai said in an interview after the morning keynote. In addition to formally unveiling Gears during the morning presentation, Huber touted two other products: Google Mashup Editor, an online editor for building mashups with a few lines of XML, and Google Mapplets, for putting online gadgets on maps. With Mapplets, an application could be built such as one that searches for hotels near an airport, according to Google. Google's free event in San Jose attracted 1,500 persons. Meanwhile, a total of 10 Google Developer Day 2007 events are being held throughout the world on Thursday, including in places such as Sao Paolo, Brazil, and Moscow. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, the company's president of technology, briefly addressed the audience in San Jose. The Internet, he said, has reached the point where systems can re-create themselves, such as a mashup editor that creates Internet applications using Internet applications. A compiler, meanwhile, can compile itself, Brin said. "For the Internet to be truly self-sustaining, you really need to get the person out of the loop, and that's why we corralled all of you here in one room today," Brin said in jest. On a more serious note, Brin thanked the audience. "We want to do as much as we can to repay the community that creates such a fantastic ecosystem for us to work in," Brin said. The explosion in interest in Google of late can be attributed to its brand awareness, said blogger Frank Taylor, author of the Google Earth Blog and an attendee in San Jose. "Obviously, they just have a huge brand awareness and an ability to reach many people through their search engine," Taylor said. Even when other companies do the same thing as Google, Google gets more attention, he said. Google also is attracting top talent, said Taylor. Huber called 2006 a spectacular year for the company, with its introduction of technologies such as its AJAX search API, the Google Web Toolkit, and Google Project Hosting.
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Itâs funny how circumstances can change your perception of whatâs possible. A few months ago, key Microsoft architects were telling me that it would be impossible to decouple the Avalon presentation subsystem from the Longhorn OS.
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The move comes at a time when Microsoft is sharpening its own tools and expertise in the area.
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Microsoft is turning the software into what it hopes will be a one-stop shop for e-mail, voice mail and faxes.
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Design specialists dream up the unexpected to help Microsoft get a foothold in the living room.
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Site is part of effort to solve problems that uses Web 2.0 techniques such as mashups and wikis.
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Microsoft is, for once, trying to play nicely.  This is why it's failing.
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David Sklar points out some of the new base sites that are being offered on the PHP-based mashup site, Ning.    It's been a lot of hard work, so I'm quite excited that we've just released three great new Ning sites: Ning Videos, Ning Photos, and Ning Group.   Plus, all three sites have the juicy bits that every site on the Ning platform gets -- things such as cloneability, complete customization, and built-in REST APIs. I've been watching the feeds for clones of photos and videos -- I suppose seeing who's cloned sites you care about is the Web 2.0 version of ego surfing.    He also talks about some of the features of the Ning Photo cloneable site like the slideshow and, in Ning Video, the embeddable player. The Ning Group application also has parsing abilities to help with sharing documents/music/photos/etc with anyone.
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Blog: New Google Maps feature lets people create customized maps with content from different mashup sites
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(InfoWorld) - Companies that want to move beyond cutting and pasting information into Excel spreadsheets will have to adopt a set of APIs and create lightweight mashup applications that automate business processes, executives said during a Webcast Thursday. The event was a first of a projected series of online discussions hosted by software provider Nexaweb, which also announced a partnership with Kapow Technologies. Under the agreement, Kapow will help companies implement its Mashup Server, a visual scripting tool for making Web 2.0 applications, along with Nexaweb's platform, whose platform focuses on AJAX (asynchronous Java and XML) within service-oriented data systems. The idea is that companies that are trying to create a more efficient IT environment based on SOA could also develop online applications that tie into those systems. Kapow Technologies CTO Stefan Andreasen said the partnership would facilitate the creation of so-called enterprise mashups, which combine services in network-based data into multiple applications and make them available through a dashboard of some kind. These kinds of tools make it much easier for companies to offer self-service features to their users, he said, while making use of existing IT infrastructure. "This is not a competition with SOA but a complement that meets a different set of needs," he said. The mashups will give users better-automated tasks and the ability to deliver software programs more quickly, Andreasen said. They would in essence be what developers are calling RIAs that use APIs, such as SOAP and RSS, and offer a downloadable "offline" mode as well as an online one. "The number-one obstacle is to get access to the data," he said. "A lot of enterprises have 6,000 internal Web applications with no API ... the information the knowledge workers have is only what they can personally see on their screen." Nexaweb's chief architect, Bob Buffone, said the prime candidates for enterprise mashups will be complex, composite applications with dynamic, non-linear workflows. "We're not talking about (spreadsheets) with a few rows of information. We're talking about data that has thousands of rows that need to be updated in real-time," he said, using the example of a foreign exchange application that has to update information about currency prices with minimal latency. "Right now in companies, there's a lot of heads-down data entry. These kinds of applications will need something that doesn't require a mouse, more of a tab-type interface." Buffone said it will be important that enterprise mashups leverage existing code tools, and development infrastructure and build on the paradigms that are already in place. The goal is to create software that has the performance of a desktop application but can be deployed in a browser -- or just on a PC. "This concept of offline Web application is going to grow predominantly in the enterprise," he predicted. "No one can always be sure the Internet is going to be there when they use their application." Although some firms have been making their own mashups on an ad-hoc basis, Andreasen suggested that is going to change. "To make this work well, you will need a mashup infrastructure and products in place to leverage the opportunity," he said. Nexaweb will be hosting its next Webcast, on securing Web 2.0 applications, next Thursday. Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate