IBM Mashup Center

IBM Mashup Center is an end to end mashup platform enabling the rapid creation, sharing, and discovery of reusable application building blocks (widgets, feeds, mashups) that can be easily assembled into new applications or leveraged within existing applications - delivering lower development costs, rapid ROI, quick delivery of dynamic applications, and greater productivity.

Speed and Simplify Mashup Creation

IBM Mashup Center is designed around the primary goal of making it fast and easy for users of all skill levels to create simple Web applications from existing information sources by dragging and dropping widgets onto the page, and then wiring them together on-the-glass.

This tool includes a Mashup Builder to assemble mashups, and a set of out-of-the-box, business-ready widgets that jump start mashup creation and enhanced information visualization options, such as charting. Users can easily extend their mashup environment by incorporating custom developed widgets provided by IT, widgets available on the external IBM Mashup Catalog, or widgets from across the Web, including any of the thousands of Google Gadgets.

Once a mashup is assembled, it can be easily shared. Visual tools are provided that allow end users to define what users or groups can view or edit their various pages. Mashups can also be published to the catalog, where other users can easily reuse them.

IBM Mashup Center V2.0 contains a set of new capabilities that further speed up the delivery of mashup applications and widgets including a new browser-based tool for simple widget creation, new and enhanced visualization widgets, and a new feature called spaces that allows users to collaboratively build and share multi-page enterprise mashups to solve specific business needs.

Faster creation of mashups results in lower application backlogs, better use of IT resources, lower costs, and faster delivery of new capabilities to business users.

Unlock more information types to get more from existing enterprise investments

Unlock a wide range of information sources within the enterprise including databases, desktop and departmental information, and internal and external Web sites.

Technically-savvy users simply point-and-click using a wizard-based interface to create consumable feeds. Users can enable caching for performance optimization, add technical documentation, and specify security permissions. Using the feed generation capabilities of IBM Mashup Center, existing core systems can be better utilized and shared, without the need to copy or replicate data sources and without requiring changes to the underlying systems.

IBM Mashup Center provides out-of-the-box connectors to the most common back-end sources, from enterprise systems like SAP to desktop data like spreadsheets (csv, xls). Customers can also create their own connectors using IBM Mashup Center's highly extensible plug-in framework. IBM Mashup Center V2.0 continues to deepen support for turning existing investments into reusable and easily mashable assets. With V2.0, organizations can tap into enterprise content management repositories such as Microsoft Sharepoint, IBM FileNet and Web Services via WS-Security, WebSphere MQ solutions, and RESTful Services. These new features help companies to maximize return on investment (ROI) on previous IT investments rapidly.

Build more secure mashups with enhanced governance

IBM Mashup Center can help build a secure and sustainable foundation that organizations need for broad enterprise wide mashup usage with capabilities that properly manage and secure feeds, widgets, and mashup pages, including enhanced usage reports, content filtering, and sandboxing to ensure appropriate performance from 3rd party widgets.

Analyzing patterns of feed and mashup usage give IT better insights on dependencies and the ability to apply feed level controls such as metering and IP blocking ensure optimal security and performance in your production environment.

Transform information

IBM Mashup Center allows information feeds to be mixed and transformed into net new feeds, also known as data mashups. Using the Data Mashup builder - a visual, browser-based tool - information and business analysts can re-mix, merge, group, sort, annotate, filter, and transform feeds in a variety of ways, creating a single view of disparate sets of information in minutes. While a rich set of out-of-the-box functions and operators are provided for common manipulation tasks, advanced functions are also supported, such as regular expressions, variance, and encoding. Once a new feed is created, it can be published in a number of formats, including ATOM, RSS, JSON, and XML.

New transformation and customization functions to increase the productivity of mashup developers and enhance the flexibility of the resulting mashups are available - including expanded configuration options that support fine tuning of a mashup's user interface, new transformation functions to speed creation of data mashups, easier manipulation of nested data, and ability to generate JSON feeds.

Discover and share assets

Once mashups, widgets, or feeds are created, they can easily be published to a centralized catalog, where other users can discover and reuse them. The catalog includes built-in Web 2.0 community features like ratings, tagging and commenting. These community-enhancing features help to illuminate the most useful assets, while also increasing productivity by encouraging reuse. In addition, with the catalog, organizations can apply the appropriate levels of governance by securing which users or groups can see which assets.

The economic benefits of mashups grow as community members reuse and customize assets to decrease mashup development time. To further grow these benefits new catalog enhancements have been added such as improved sharing with bookmarks, searching by URL, and viewing the feed through a widget or browser interface let you know instantly if its what you need. An important new capability to federate catalog assets has been added that improves team sharing and improves migration support.

Create dynamic widgets

IBM Mashup Center includes Lotus Widget Factory - a powerful widget creation environment that enables developers of all skill levels to rapidly generate widgets without coding. Intuitive wizards step you through common widget creation tasks, such as building interactive user interfaces for REST-based services, enabling widgets to send and receive events, or generating dynamic widget personalization screens. Lotus Widget Factory is tightly integrated with IBM Mashup Center, supporting automatic deployment of widgets to the mashup server, helping to speed testing and increase developers' productivity. New capabilities include drag and drop widget creation and new interactive UI controls.

IBM Mashup Center is part of IBM's portfolio of enterprise mashup tools- to learn more including how you can use WebSphere sMash to create assets with PHP and Groovy scripting for use in IBM Mashup Center visit Enterprise Mashup Technologies.