WebSphere sMash

Introducing WebSphere sMash – Leveraging Web 2.0 to Meet the "Situational" Needs of Business

In today's market climate, there is increased pressure to build applications quickly to answer the situational needs of the business -- for example, applications to handle specific budget issues, users registering for an event, or the flow of an online transaction. These situational needs are being satisfied more easily than ever before by a growing number of services on the web and revolve around new programming approaches, mainly dynamic scripting languages such as PHP and Groovy.

Sometimes the needs of the business call for the creation of strategic core business applications, but more often, an application is needed to fulfill a more tactical need. To make these types of situational applications feasible from a cost/benefit perspective, they should be simple to create, support reuse and sharing of services, and be quickly adaptable as the needs of the group or user change.

IBM WebSphere® sMash software is a development and execution platform based on the highly-acclaimed public incubator Project Zero (hosted at projectzero.org). WebSphere sMash advances Smart SOA's simplicity and accelerates the alignment of Business and IT by allowing developers to quickly and simply deliver dynamic Web 2.0 based applications, enabling mashups.

WebSphere sMash for Developers:

• Unleash Content as REST Services
  Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style that allows services to be exposed and consumed over the Web using only a simple URL. Leveraging REST technology, WebSphere sMash extends SOA to the web -- effectively using the Web as the SOA platform.

  
  Using WebSphere sMash, companies can enable new models of revenue by unleashing their content to the world as REST services, take advantage of the huge array of REST services available on the Web to build new applications, and easily reuse these assets in future projects.

• Leverage the Power of Scripting for Agile Development
  Because WebSphere sMash applications are based on dynamic scripting, they can be run without any compilation -- a feature which eases the overhead of application development and makes modification and customization easy.

  
  WebSphere sMash supports two dynamic scripting languages, PHP Hypertext Preprocessor (commonly known as PHP), and Groovy, a dynamic scripting language which leverages existing Java skills.

  
  Furthermore, because WebSphere sMash only uses the modules it needs, the storage and memory footprints are exceptionally small (You can even run it from a USB key!) and the server can restart in seconds!

• Quickly Combine Services and Feeds with Visual Tools
  WebSphere sMash offers visual assembly-style development for designing server-side business logic as well as visual design editors for designing rich user interfaces.

  
  Using the visual assembly tool, developers can easily tie together disparate services and feeds into new applications and create server-side business logic (such as exchanging data with a backend system or kicking off an approval process via an e-mail).

WebSphere sMash for Partners

The growing need for situational applications presents a fantastic opportunity for IBM Business Partners. Using WebSphere sMash, Business Partners can quickly create situational applications to meet their clients' needs. And this faster time-to-value makes projects more cost effective.

Using WebSphere sMash, you can:

• Quickly build and deliver situational applications that meet your clients' specific needs

• Leverage REST technology to expose and consume web services and take advantage of your clients' exiting SOA investments

• Provide a cost effective solution that complies with key IT operations guidelines around manageability, scalability, and security

• Assemble server-side logic and build user interfaces for your clients using visual tooling

WebSphere sMash -- In Three Words

Speed:

• Dynamic scripting languages

• Fewer lines of code

• Browser-based tooling

Simplicity:

• Leverage pre-existing content

• Use the web as your SOA platform

• Visual Assembly-style development

Agility:

• Small footprint

• Easily modify your applications

• Restart the server in seconds