Alex Barnett blog : Mashup

Designing Web APIs - Twitter Learnings

alexbarnett — Thu, 01 May 2008 11:08:00 GMT

Although I made it to Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week, I didn't make it to a session Matt McAlister blogged about by Twitter’s Alex Payne and Michael Migurski of Stamen Design who presented learnings from the perspective of an API provider.

But I can see the slide deck discussing the Twitter API and so can you:

| View | Upload your own

More Web 2.0 session slides available here. Recommended:

Videos of sessions here. Check out Clay Shirky's session, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (a good read btw).

See Results of Bungee Connect's Intern DevFest 2008

alexbarnett — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:54:00 GMT

In late 2007, fifty Computer Science university students applied for 2008 internships at Bungee Labs. We flew nine of the most promising applicants from around the US to join Bungee Labs for our first “Intern DevFest”.

Over a 24 hour period the students had to extend WideLens - the Bungee Connect calendaring reference application - to develop new features and create a new derivative WideLens application…then present the results to the judging panel.

The nine students slogged hard all day (with frisbee breaks!) and most of the night and then presented their mashup solutions to the judging team the next morning.

Check out the video highlights of the four winners.

Sync Google Calendar with Outlook and more with WideLens

alexbarnett — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 05:37:00 GMT

Google has just released a very cool utility (.exe download for Windows) providing users with the ability to synchronize their Google Calendar with Outlook.

Some nice features in their 0.9.3.0 release:

schedule the sync frequency: every x minutes
define directional flow: 2-way, and 1-way (either way)

A bit of a buzz going on about this...

Now, what if you could do the same over the web - no download, just use your browser (IE, FF, Safari)...? And not just Google Calendar <> Outlook, but others too...?

Well, it's certainly possible...First, watch this screencast I put together tonight (apologies for sound quality...done from home equipment):

About WideLens

A couple of weeks back Bungee Labs released a reference calendaring application, called WideLens, designed to show off some of the power of the Bungee Connect platform, from the kind of rich AJAX UI experiences delivered through to the high level of functionality developers can create by wiring up and integrating multiple web services and distributed web data sources into a single web app.

Video: WideLens User Experience
Video: Developer Overview

WideLens connects to Microsoft Exchange calendar, Google Calendar, Salesforce.com, Facebook, MySQL and iCalendar feeds, representing a variety of protocols and authentication schemes. MS Exchange is accessed through WebDav, Google Calendar through gData, Salesforce.com via SOAP, Facebook through REST and MySQL connectivity is based on client libraries provided by MySQL (integrated directly inside Bungee Connect).

WideLens is an uber-mashup.

WideLens connects to each of the sources in real-time, presenting the user with live data. With the exception of Facebook and iCalendar, users can create and modify events and those changes are immediately posted back to the source. MySQL pulls double duty, serving as both a WideLens native calendar source and as the persistence layer for all kinds of application data including user preferences and credential information for each service.

Developers: Have At it!

As mentioned above, WideLens has been released as a Bungee Connect reference application where we're encouraging Bungee Connect developers to customize the WideLens application as much as they want, deploy their own version of the app as their own app - to their own domain, at no charge, branded however they want and with whatever features / cuts / modifications / extended they want - the WideLens code is released under a BSD licence (read more here).

To get going with Bungee Connect and develop your own vision of what WideLens could do, sign up for your Bungee Connect account.

Astoria at MIX08 (REST in Vegas)

alexbarnett — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 02:11:00 GMT

As much as I'd love to make it to MIX08 this week, time will not allow me...But if I were, then I'd be going to the following three sessions related to the Project Formerly Known as Astoria:

Wed, March 5th - RESTful Data Services with the ADO.NET Data Services Framework
Fri, March 7th - Accessing Windows Live Services via AtomPub
Fri, March 7th - Building RESTful Real World Applications with the ADO.NET Data Services Framework

Time to Define "Platform as a Service" (or PaaS)

alexbarnett — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 09:27:00 GMT

Before joining Bungee Labs last year, I knew they were on to something big. I mean, really big.

A big idea, an ambitious vision: to provide developers with end-to-end development, testing, deployment and hosting of sophisticated web applications as a service delivered purely in the cloud.

Since we announced our private beta back in May 2007, we've had over 1,500 developers sign up. In January alone we had over 400 developers kicking the tires - not just signing up and disappearing, but 400 returning developers, learning, building and deploying out increasingly sophisticated apps on a fast evolving developer platform, requiring no install of anything on their machine - all through the browser.

And since May 2007, the trend to delivering software as a service (SaaS) has been moving at terrific pace. New web APIs are being made available every month and new announcements by start-ups as well established big players are reinforcing and fueling the acceleration to the inevitable world of cloud computing.

As we announce our move from private to public beta today, we've also tried to articulate the new category of product and service we believe Bungee Connect is at the forefront of defining, the category of Platform as a Service, or PaaS, and our big bet is that PaaS is the next big thing.

So what is a "Platform as a Service"?

In September 2006, Marc Andreessen posted his thought provoking "The three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet" and it got a fair level attention from the web industry. And we took note. We thought what Marc was describing in his Level 3 definition where:

"A Level 3 platform's apps run inside the platform itself -- the platform provides the "runtime environment" within which the app's code runs.",

...was right, but only partly right. Given Bungee Labs' ambition and vision, we felt there was a lot more to Marc's definition of the highest level definition of an "internet platform", a definition more holistic and comprehensive than a runtime.

But we kept focused, kept working on what we were hearing our developers telling us we needed to fix and improve on Bungee Connect, to give what developers are telling us what they really want - a Platform as a Service - to provide everything required in the lifecycle for the development through hosting of full-on, sophisticated and highly interactive web apps, not just widgets.

As we were readying for our next phase -our public beta - we thought it would be a good time to put a stake in the ground and actually define what we mean when we use the term Platform-as-a-service, and thereby describe the comprehensiveness what Bungee Connect has to offer.

So early this morning, our CTO and Founder of Bungee Labs, Dave Mitchell posted a definition describing PaaS in concrete terms.

What follows is a summary of Dave's post, with a selection of my favorite "soundbites" and ideas, but I suggest you read the whole post for yourself - there's a fair amount to consider:

1) Develop, Test, Deploy, Host and Maintain on the Same Integrated Environment.

"It’s time to stop developing “here” and running “there”. Today, most applications are coded in one environment (usually custom-built for that project by a developer), then tested in another, and redeployed to yet another for production...In a completely-realized PaaS, the entire software lifecycle is supported on the same computing environment, dramatically reducing costs of development and maintenance, time-to-market and project risk. A PaaS should let developers spend their time creating great software, rather than building environments and wrestling with configurations just to make their applications run — let alone testing, tuning and debugging them...Also, an end-to-end PaaS should provide a high productivity Integrated Development Environment (IDE) running on the actual target delivery platform, so that debugging and test scenarios run in the same environment as production deployment.

2) User Experience Without Compromise

"A Platform-as-a-Service must deliver compelling user experiences, with all the richness and live interactivity that consumers have been conditioned to expect....Hiccups like software downloads or plug-in installations, browser dependencies and inconsistencies, or local executables break the web model, and are inherently less secure, less maintainable and less user-friendly. In order to be relevant and popular, PaaS must deliver the best user experience available on the web, comparable to or better than conventional approaches.

3) Built-in Scalability, Reliability, and Security

"Developers should be free to build applications with the comfort that the security of customer data, network traffic, source code (intellectual property) and even server hardware is maintained automatically by the platform through-out application development and delivery."

4) Built-in Integration with Web Services and Databases.

"Applications need to leverage existing software investments in databases, and internal or external third party web services, requiring that the platform offer a wide variety of connectivity options."

5) Support Collaboration

"A PaaS must support both formal and on-demand collaboration throughout the entire software lifecycle (development, testing, documentation and operations), while maintaining security of source code and associated intellectual property."

6) Deep Application Instrumentation

"With instrumentation, organizations can see exactly how users are using the application, the type of performance they are experiencing and any application crashes. This information can also be leveraged to create new business models where costs are tied to actual utilities, rather than flat-rate subscriptions or licenses."

Over the next couple of years we expect to be hearing a lot more about PaaS and how "Y announcement" by "X company" is now providing true a PaaS offering to businesses and developers.

But saying you are providing a Platform as a Service has to mean something, and we think the above definition sets a high but reasonable standard that must be met for any company to claim they are providing a "platform-as-a-service' and legitimately describe themselves as a PaaS player.

The amazing thing is, for me at least, is that Bungee Connect is delivering all of the above, today. From our point of view, delivering PaaS - the real deal - is not statement of Bungee's intent, it's a statement of fact. It's bold, but so is our vision. Yes, we've still a lot to do before we're commercially ready and we think that's coming soon, but so much is already there. Try it out.

8 Trends in Software as a Service Platforms

alexbarnett — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 17:40:00 GMT

To kick off the new year, I presented to around 40 or 50 members of Utah Technology Council (UTC) last week. The title of the topic they asked me to speak about was "Trends in Software as a Service Platforms". I searched around for some ideas and came across two recent posts predicting trends in SaaS for 2008, one by Phil Wainewright "Eight Reasons SaaS Will Surge in 2008" and Jeff Kaplan's post "Top Ten Reasons Why On-Demand Services in 2008". I decided to borrow liberally from these (thanks Phil and Jeff) and mash these two together (along with a couple of thoughts of my own) and present "8 Trends in Software as a Service Platforms" to an audience made up of CTOs and VPs of engineering and development for software companies in the Utah area.

In preparation for the presentation, my boss (Martin Plaehn) at Bungee Labs suggested I write up my presentation as notes blog them afterward, so here they are.

8 Trends in Software as a Service Platforms

SaaS is just part of the web mega-trend
Mainstream opinion says “Yes” to SaaS
Software vendors stampede into SaaS
All is being virtualized
Explosion of Web APIs
Economic factors favor SaaS
Enterprise and SMB IT embraces SaaS
SaaS platforms proliferate (PaaS)

1. SaaS is just part of the web mega-trend

Most of us have witnessed and many of us have been a part of the transformation in the way goods and services have been digitized, virtualized, delivered and consumed. Software, the data behind that software and the functionality that software provides is no different - software is subject to the very same transformational forces.

Just think about how even a class of product that is natively digital - such as software - has been transformed in the way it is delivered and consumed. For prosperity's sake, I've still got a few of those ZX81 software cassettes stashed away somewhere, gathering dust, looking ever more antiquated with each passing year. How will today's mode of software delivery and use look to us in a few years from now?

The web wants to connect things, and that's interesting. But connecting and interacting with "live" data, information and remote functionality make things more interesting.

At the fundamental level, the web connects things. It connects people to people, businesses to businesses, and people to businesses. Since the early 90's, the web has enabled the connection of so many things to so many other things at an ever accelerating rate, and yet we crave even more connectivity. But we increasingly also want the ability to interact with those things.

And it is the nature of these connected things that have changed since the early internet. The early web was good at connecting to static views of information and accessing limited and rigid functional services, very much a read-only mode. Then, as we learned a) the ability to read more dynamic-type information - at least regularly updated, and b) access richer remote functionality, we created whole new opportunities for ourselves. Next, we grew our ability read and write against dynamic, near real-time data and information and to program against remote functionality to create a new class of web applications leveraging those capabilities - and hence a new order of business and experiential opportunities have emerged. Some label this as "Web 2.0".

At its essence, it is the "liveness" of these real-time read-write data, information and functional sources available as "always on" services and the increasing ease to connect to, interact with - specifically change those resources available as live, programmable services that allows us to create new value out of those resources, opening up brand new market opportunities for businesses and the compelling, rich "live" end-user experiences of tomorrow.

2. Mainstream opinion says “Yes” to SaaS

Not surprisingly, Wall Street loves the the predictability of subscription services. It's good for cash flow, forecasting and business planning.

The venture firms also relish the opportunities that are opening up in a software as services-oriented economy. The ability to circumnavigate the incumbent software players with new disruptive technologies and propositions that are significantly easier to try and access for prospective customers compared to traditional software evaluation, along with usage and subscription-based business models verses the old licensing model makes investing in services-based software companies very compelling propositions from the venture firms' point of view. We should also see healthy M&A activity based on these similar opportunities in the coming year.

And then there's the trend for offshore / IT business process outsourcing. These providers will surely get in the game and make their plays through investments in and acquisitions of SaaS vendors that align well with their current core businesses.

Add to that the excitement we're reading about the SaaS space from the IT Analysts, journalists and bloggers, plus the new book by Nick Carr (author of “IT Doesn’t Matter”) - delivered by Amazon to me last week: “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google”. I think there's little doubt Carr's excellent analysis of the computing industry as an analogy to the electricity industry's shift to a utility model will be on business bestseller list for much of 2008. His messages resonates with corporate executives and end-users agree with him:

IT is a needless hassle,
it should be as easy as electricity and
be as reliable as a utility

3. Software vendors stampede into SaaS

The Big Software Players are following the early SaaS successes

CRM as a case in point. If you've been following the CRM software market, you'll know about the noises Oracle-Siebel, SAP and Microsoft started to make in the 2007 about what they are are lining up for the 2008 in terms of CRM as a service. Their efforts to emulate Salesforce.com's success delivering CRM as SaaS will be key strategic bets from the incumbents' point of view - and loud, price and functionally competitive propositions from the point of view of their existing and prospective customers.

CRM is just one of the multiple horizontal solution categories to transform from on-premise with traditional licensing model to a service-based delivery and subscription-based revenue model. ERP, supply chain, e-commerce, HR and many more...the horizontal solution list goes on. And then there are the vertical solution players...

Here's another data point to consider regarding the move by traditional software vendors to a SaaS model:

“15-20% of application ISVs have already either begun new skunk works initiatives or gained access to SaaS assets and development experience through M&A activity”
(Source: Key Trends in SaaS: 2008 and Beyond, Saugatuck Technology)

4. All is being virtualized

Virtualization is a technology trend.

Virtualization enables hardware as a service. The demand for virtual machines met by hypervisor software (VMWare, Xen, Hyper-V) and the success of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in the last couple of years point to a continuation of further virtualization of applications and hardware. Virtualization is accelerating the move from traditional on-premise software to services.

Virtualization is a business trend.

We continue to become a mobile workforce. The younger entrants into the workforce in service-oriented economies expect and want to be always connected. It's very hard work, if not impossible to get your traditional on-premise applications and centralized servers sitting behind a firewall to serve today's mobile workers. SaaS and managed services meet the needs square on.

5. The explosion of Web APIs is upon us

According to ProgrammableWeb.com, there are 559 commercial and public APIs available today, most of these are new and there are plenty more to come. How many will we see go live this year? And how many private web APIs are there and will be developed and consumed in the coming year?

Data from ProgrammableWeb.com

6. Economic factors favor SaaS

On-premise software requires upfront capital investments
To lower costs, many companies hold back on their capital investments to mitigate their risks, especially in recessions
Adopting on-demand services on a pay-as-you-go basis will be a perfect sourcing strategy for businesses seeking greater cost-controls and flexibility – the utility model

All well and good, but the real economic value of SaaS is that fact that it unleashes new value of previously isolated data silos and functionality.

7. Enterprise and SMB embraces SaaS

When it comes to IT, who doesn't like

Low-maintenance?
Low cost?
Low-resource profile?

IT and business folk like these things, and externally delivered SaaS applications deliver these benefits.

8. SaaS platforms proliferate (PaaS)

The more mainstream SaaS becomes the more the large vendors will be forced to offer effective platforms for ISVs, enterprises and SMBs.

If the move by the software vendors from traditional on-premise software to a services model is to be successful, they will need to provide programmable interfaces - not just end-user interfaces - to their services for their customers. Customers need and want the ability to access, intergrate and create new value out of live, programmable data, information and functionality living in the cloud. And in turn these same customers will want their custom-developed composite applications and integrated data available as programmable services - yet more APIs.

Customers want to unleash new value of previously isolated data silos and functionality through the development of their own applications programmed against those resources. And in turn these same customers will want their own custom-developed composite applications and newly integrated data available as end-user interfaces and as programmable services - yet more APIs. These customer needs will drive the software market to provide platforms to provide businesses and developers with with end-to-end:

programmable services and data integration
application development, testing and collaboration tools
deployment and scalable delivery

...all as a service with a utility model.

(hey...I needed to mentioned Bungee Connect just the once ;-).

2008 will mark a the proliferation of such offerings as "platforms as services" (or PaaS) through 2009, where then the consolidation will begin. Interesting SaaS and PaaS times ahead.

Update 2/20/2008: see "Time to Define "Platform as as Service" (PaaS)

The presentation seemed to go down pretty well and we had lots of interesting discussion throughtout. One of the topics we discussed was data security in a SaaS world. Don Kleinschnitz (VP, Development at Symantec) followed up with a mail linking to his blog covering Security 2.0 topics.

Again - thanks to Phil Wainewright and Jeff Kaplan for their post and to Martin for suggesting I blog this.

OAuth Podcast

alexbarnett — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 14:45:00 GMT

Chris Messina (aka FactoryJoe), Larry Halff (of Ma.gnolia) and Eran Hammer-Lahav accepted our invitation to join Ted and me and discuss OAuth in our latest Bungee Line podcast.

What is OAuth? From OAuth Getting Started - Part 1, here's the jist of it:

"OAuth allows you to share your private resources (photos, videos, contact list, bank accounts) stored on one site with another site without having to hand out your username and password.

...Users don’t care about protocols and standards – they care about better experience with enhanced privacy and security. This is exactly what OAuth sets to achieve. With web services on the rise, people expect their services to work together in order to accomplish something new. Instead of using a single site for all their online needs, users use one site for their photos, another for videos, another for email, and so on. No one site can do everything better. In order to enable this kind of integration, sites need to access the user resources from other sites, and those are many times protected (private family photos, work documents, bank records)."

Adam Kalsey, summarizes it well:

"OAuth aims to standardize the way in which different consumer systems share data. The goal is to allow a person to give an application access to do some things on your accounts at other sites, but not everything. It’s role-based authorization for APIs."

OAuth is a big idea, but is it a "solution looking for a problem to solve"? I don't think so. The problem for end users today is real, i.e. authorizing one service to access your data by another service for use by the first service, securely and with control. For developers wanting to develop apps and services that create value through the use of customer data stored on other services, there is no standardized means set of protocols to lean on. Instead, developers need to waste time learning a new way for their app to be authorized to do so for each service provider, having to jump through the various specific means and idiosyncrasies of each service.

The current way is broken - too many means to the same end, for end-users, for developers leveraging service APIs and for the service providers themselves wanting to extend their services through web APIs.

OAuth is getting the attention from a number of people and services such as Six Apart and others ("Digg, Jaiku, Flickr, Ma.gnolia, Plaxo, Pownce, Twitter, and hopefully Google, Yahoo, and others soon to follow") have committed to run with it. This is good news, but we need to get the word out there and help make developers' lives easier. So, go listen to first OAuth podcast and evangelize OAuth!

Topics covered:

Background on Chris, Larry, and Eran
What problem is OAuth trying to solve?
What is the current identity landscape - what are the alternatives, and why is OAuth a better way for all?
How does OAuth work, who should use it?
What's the development experience like?
What's the end-user experience like?
What's the relationship between OAuth and OpenID?
Where is OAuth today?
What will it take for OAuth to succeed?
Who's backing OAuth - adopters?

Part 2 - Interview with Jeremy Zawodny

alexbarnett — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 00:30:00 GMT

Part 2 of the interview podcast with Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! is now published. Lots of ground covered again. Actually, I think the the better half of the interview...a bit more free-floating:

Topics covered

How would we feel about your friends being able to edit your profile on a social network? Scary? Well, that's what Mash lets you do. (Mash is currently an invitation-only beta service...I could do with an invite...nudge, nudge)
When Jeremy wrote about Hadoop and Yahoo!'s formal involvement, it got plenty of attention from the open source community. According to Wikipedia, Hadoop is a "Free Java software framework that supports distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers that process huge amounts of data." When the news broke, Tim O'Reilly considered Hadoop to be an important open source project since:

"Web 2.0 software-as-a-service applications built on top of the LAMP stack now generate several orders of magnitude more revenue than any companies seeking to directly monetize open source. And most of the software used by those Web 2.0 companies above the commodity platform layer is proprietary. Not only that, Web 2.0 is siphoning developers and buzz away from open source."

O'Reilly went on to write that Yahoo!'s support of the Hadoop effort indicates how open source is becoming an increasingly key component of Web 2.0 players' competitive strategy - build your own and spend gazillions, or support an open source project that does what you need and get dev-cred along thw way. Jeremy shared his views on the announcement.

Next, we went on the the topic of the WebOS meme, something Jeremy feels strongly about :-) That was fun. Watch out for the discussion on "Meta-API Providers"...
More APIs...From b2c APIs to b2b APIs
'dem Pipes and democratizing the mashupshpere

Big thanks again Jeremy for his time.

Part 1 (in case you missed it)
Part 2

Podcast with John Musser of ProgrammableWeb.com

alexbarnett — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 16:38:00 GMT

A couple of weeks back John Musser of ProgrammableWeb.com joined me and Ted for a chat to discuss the state of web APIs and the API trends as he sees them.

We've now recorded the conversation and published as the first of a newly launched Bungee Line podcast series.

Topic covered include Facebook APIs, Amazon's recently launched Flexible Payment Service (FPS) , Google Base, Microsoft's Astoria and relational-data-in-the-cloud programming models and services, SaaS models and API SLAs, REST vs SOAP, "Closed is Still the Old Closed" and plenty more.

Thanks to John for his time.

Enterpise mashups with Salesforce.com

alexbarnett — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 18:08:00 GMT

In San Francisco this morning for Salesforce.com conference, Dreamforce 07.

Am here (along with Ted, Brad and Lyle from Bungee Labs)...we're frankly wowwing a few Saleforce.com customers and developers with a couple of cool videos, demos and real-world apps created on Bungee Connect.

Here's a demo of Microsoft Exchange mashed up with Saleforce.com
Check this video - Salesforce.com extended with an Bungee app integrated into the Salesforce UI

We're getting some Bungee Connect Early Access Beta sign-ups based on what devs are seeing (sign up here)

If you want to meet up, let me know.

Dan Farber is covering the Dreamforce event here.

Geo-crime mashups

alexbarnett — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 12:36:00 GMT

I think I've hit a personal first: a depressing mashup. Oakland Crimestopping is a Flash-based vizualization tool overlaying reported crime data in Oakland, CA, by type (from aggrevated assault to murder to burglary) and time on a Virtual Earth map.

Fortunately, I live nowhere near Oakland, but if I did I think I'd try to live on a pontoon on Lake Merritt. This is what July 27 to August 24 2007 looks like:

To fuel an ongoing level of anxiety, you can subscribe to email alerts or to customized RSS feeds based on specific queries. Example - track all the fun and games going on within 1/2 mile of High St.

This post by the one of the site's developers, Michal Migurski, mentions future areas to cover might include San Francisco and Berkeley. Check out the juicy implementation details.

Two more crime maps tools you can get depressed about are Portland's CrimeMapper (e.g. a generated report on crimes on Richmond, Portland in the last 12 months) and LA Times' Homicide map (536 murders in 2007 and counting).

(via information aesthetics)

6 Google APIs - the Lesser Known

alexbarnett — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 13:46:00 GMT

Adam Ostrow at Mashable has written up a non-technical introduction to Google's most popular APIs and links to some applications built using these.

His post prompted me to revisit Google's own Google APIs page this morning which lists some 36 services available to programmers. Although they are not all strictly APIs (some just provide RSS / Atom outputs) I thought I'd call out some of the lesser known Google APIs, six in all:

1. YouTube API

The YouTube video repository and user community are accessable via an API interface and RSS feeds (REST Interface or XML-RPC Interface) . Developers need a YouTube Developer Profile to gain access.

Example apps using YouTube API:

YouTube Coverpops
Creates a mosaic of video stills; mouse over the one you want to pop up and watch.
YouTube Badge Maker
Makes a code snippet that you can add to your website that shows stills from your six latest-uploaded videos.
Virtual Video Map
Integrates video location with Google Maps—click on the map marker to see a video from that location.
YouTube Video Gallery Plugin
Enables easy setup of video embeds and galleries into WordPress blogs, using video IDs.

2. Google Notebook API

Google Notebook is an online service (requires browser plugin) where you can store and organize clippings of text, images and links from web pages. The Google Notebook data API allows apps to view public notebook content in the form of Google data API ("GData") feeds such as request a list of a user's public notebooks, or query the content of an existing public notebook.

3. Google Search History Feeds - Feed your attention.

Not really an "API", but...you probably knew Google tracks your search history. Did you know you can track your "web history" via an RSS feed?

4. Google Checkout API

"Start selling on your website"

There are two types of Google Checkout implementation options:

XML APIs enable merchants to access all Google Checkout features. XML implementations are recommended for merchants who need to be able to digitally sign orders before sending them to Google. XML implementations are also recommended for merchants who want to offer coupons or discounts and for merchants who plan to integrate Google Checkout with their internal order processing and billing systems.
HTML APIs enable merchants to send information to Google Checkout and receive information from Google Checkout using name/value pairs rather than XML. HTML implementations are recommended for small merchants who do not want to generate XML. Merchants can not digitally sign orders in HTML implementations, so merchants who use this implementation should plan to review orders manually.

Example of companies using Google Checkout include the merchant Skates.com and ecommerce solution company Volusion (see this article at ecommerce-guide.com).

5. Google Mapplets

Google Mapplets are mini-apps that can be embedded within the Google Maps. This implementation has examples include Gas Prices, Crop Circles (!) and real estate search. "Mapplets" are Google Gadgets that can manipulate the map using Javascript calls that are derived from the Google Maps API - but beware, there are differences.

(update: Read/Write has just written up a post covering some uses of Mapplets here.)

6. Google Talk XMPP

Developers can integrate their own applications into the Google Talk (its instant messaging service) connect (federate) their service with Google's (allowing "service choice". The "XMPP" bit of Google Talk is used for voice signaling and peer-to-peer communication...in addition, Google plans to support SIP signaling in the future.

Today, the Google Talk service is built on the following open-source protocols:

XMPP - Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol; an IETF standard for instant messaging. XMPP was originally called Jabber, and the XMPP enhancement proposals were previously called Jabber Enhancement Protocols (JEPs). They are now called XEPs.
Jingle - A family of XMPP extensions that make it possible to initiate and maintain peer-to-peer sessions. Specific Jingle extensions support voice streaming, video streaming, and file-sharing sessions. (Watch out for the Google-specific non stardard XMPP extensions)

I could only find three mashups as examples using the Google Talk service (courtesy of ProgrammableWeb) - Gtalkr, Imified Instand Messenger Buddy and Jabber Google Map.

Mashup design patterns

alexbarnett — Tue, 22 May 2007 16:27:00 GMT

<warning: the following post meanders, is unstrucutured and doesn't arrive at any conclusion>

In the middle of last year, I invited Dion to meet with me and other members of Microsoft's Data Programmability team to discuss REST in the context of data access over the web. Dion's perspective is one of the reasons our team was able to recognise the potential of a RESTful programming model against relational data, manifested today as Project Astoria.

I've been waiting to read Dion's thoughts on Project Astoria (via John Musser). It's an interesting take, contextualizing Astoria within the overall architectural trends we're seeing take place.

I liked this diagram and got me thinking (dangerous...):

Dion warns that the diagram like this could never be complete representation of the concepts discussed in his post and is work in progress. The mapping done here for the 3 types of applications (Composite Applications, Recombinant Software and Mashups) makes some sense to me. However, it reminds me that I have used the terms "Composite applications" and "Mashups" interchangeably (but never Recombinant Software) depending on who I'm speaking to and without really thinking through what I mean by these terms. To try and clarify my own thinking on this, here's my effort to do so...

Here are the Wikipedia definitions of Composite Applications, Recombinant Software and Mashups.

Composite applications

"the term composite application expresses a perspective of software engineering that defines an application built by combining multiple services. A composite application consists of functionality drawn from several different sources within a service oriented architecture (SOA). The components may be individual web services, selected functions from within other applications, or entire systems whose outputs have been packaged as web services (often legacy systems)."
Recombinant software
<none>
Mashup
"A mashup is a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience."

So nothing in Wikipedia for "Recombinant software", but in searching for a definition I did come another post by Dion written in June 2006 - "Is IBM making enterprise mashups respectable?". Here Dion asserted:

"Accepting that information, visuals, and software can be remixed and combined at multiple levels in an application stack means that there are (at least) five places that mashups can take place."

Dion then went on to define 5 mashup types:

Presentation Mashup: This is the shallowest form of mashup in the sense that underlying data and functionality don’t meet. Information and laout is retrieved and either remix or just placed next to each other. Many of the Ajax desktops today fall into this category and so do portals and other presentation mashup techniques.
Client-Side Data Mashup: A slight deeper form of mashup is the data mashup which takes information from remote Web services, feeds, or even just plain HTML and combines it with data from another source. New information that didn’t exist before can result such as when addresses are geocoded and display on a map to create a visualization that could exist without the underlying combination of data.
Client-Side Software Mashup: This is where code is integrated in the browser to result in a distinct new capability. While a component model for the browser is only now being hashed out as part of Open Ajax, there is considerable potential in being able to easily wire together pieces of browser-based software into brand new functionality.
Server-Side Software Mashup: Recombinant software is probably easier right now on the server since Web services can more easily use other Web services and there are less security restrictions and cross domain issues. As a result, server-side mashups like those that in turn use things like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk or any of the hundreds of open Web APIs currently available, are quite common.
Server-Side Data Mashup: Databases have been linking and connecting data for decades, and as such, they have relatively powerful mechanisms to join or mashup data under the covers, on the server-side. While it’s still harder to mashup up data across databases from different vendors, products like Microsoft SQL Server increasingly make it much easier to do. This points out that many applications we have today are early forms of mashups, despite the term. Of course, the more interesting and newer aspects of mashups happen above this level.

Back to the plot...

When speaking with an "enterprisey" architect I use the term "Composite applications". "Enterprisey" architects think and talk in terms of governance, security, scale and complexity. They also like to hear and use technical sounding terms that confound non-IT folks ;-)

When speaking with a developer, I tend to use the term "Mashups". Developers are smart and lazy - they want to write fewer lines of code, do more with less and love to impress. In my mind at least, the term "mashup" implies a speedy development / test / deploy cycle, design flexibility and simplicity in the sense that its "less hard to do".

Now, if I'm talking to a developer who works in the enterprise context (enterprise as in a large business) the term "enterprise mashup" can connect the "enterprisey" values - governance, security, scale but without the complexity AND with the "mashup" values - speed, flexibility and simplicity.

Reviewing the 5 mashup design patterns above, there is reasonably defined line: Client-side vs. Server-side. Some of the fall into the WOA space - referring to Dion's diagram above:

"Another important item: The bottom of the overlapping circle contains a cryptic acronym near the edge of the circle: WOA. This stands for Web-Oriented Architecture, a concept that I’ve written about several times here and here in this blog. It’s an idea that basically states that software that goes naturally with the “grain” of the Web, extending the core infrastructure of the Web in natural ways, works the best."

Announcing Bungee Connect

alexbarnett — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 07:11:00 GMT

At last, I can tell you more about what Bungee Labs has been up to...

We've just announced details about Bungee Connect, a 100% on-demand web development and deployment environment that will be going into Beta phase in May.

Over the next three days at the Web 2.0 Expo 2007 and on bungeeconnect.com we'll be providing a lot more detail on exactly what Bungee Connect is, how it works and why we think it will be a big deal when we go live.

So before I go on, let me quote a couple of people who have already seen Bungee Connect in action behind closed doors. The following are from tonight's two press releases (1 and 2)

First off, Dion Hinchcliffe:

“Ajax is just the beginning of the RIA story and Bungee Labs provides the rest of the solution with a web-based IDE, on-demand scalable deployment, a well-designed community model and a built-in component ecosystem with real-world licensing options,” said Dion Hinchcliffe, ZDNet blogger; President/CTO, Hinchcliffe & Co.; and editor in chief, AjaxWorld Magazine. “Bungee Connect is a surprisingly complete one-stop shop for the RIA development, deployment and operations lifecycle.”

Next, Dana Gardner:

“Given the current disjointed state of tools, testing and deployment models, most developers find creating rich internet applications (RIAs) to be complex, time-consuming and expensive,” said Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions. “By combining development, testing and deployment functions into an integrated, low-cost-of-entry service approach, Bungee Connect both broadens the numbers of developers that can produce web applications as well as slashes the barriers of entry for creating innovative ecommerce services and web-based businesses."

The Bungee Labs team has been working very closely with the Amazon team (and others API providers) the last few months to make sure Amazon's web services "just work" with Bungee Connect. Jeff Barr, Senior Evangelist for Amazon's Web Services:

“Bungee Labs’ decision to make their development environment integrate seamlessly with Amazon Web Services is great news for our developer community,” said Jeff Barr, Senior Evangelist for Amazon Web Services. “AWS developers can now use Bungee Connect to directly access our services, which means they can build Web-Scale applications in an easy to use, browser-based development environment.”

Another provider of web APIs, Salesforce.com has also been working closely with the Bungee Labs engineers. This time a quote from Adam Gross, Vice President, Developer Marketing, Salesforce.com:

“Salesforce.com has demonstrated that the innovation and ideas of the consumer Internet are at the core of the next generation of business applications. Bungee Connect together with Salesforce.com’s Apex platform makes it easier for developers to create mashups for their businesses, and in doing so hastens the transition from traditional enterprise software to the new on-demand model of building and deploying applications.”

So, what is Bungee Connect? Well, it's a lot of things:

Bungee Connect is a completely web-based integrated development environment (IDE) for building and deploying rich Ajax web applications, from simple web apps to seriously sophisticated Ajax applications. No install for developers, no installation of delivery infrastructure, and no client install for end users.
Bungee Connect is for developers, not for consumers. Yes, it provides a huge amount of automated support for the integration of SOAP and REST-based web services, Ajax app development and state management. You can develop sophisticated apps that integrate powerful (as well as simple) web services plus develop your own logic without having to write a line of code. It massivley reduces complexity. But, nonetheless, it is for developers, not consumers.
Bungee Connect provides a completely integrated means of deploying apps to the live web. No FTP. No separation between your dev, staging, production and live environment. No local set-up on your machine. No bits to install anywhere. No web servers, no app servers, no stacks, nor libraries to install, patch or manage. No 'Yak shaving'. It's all taken care of for you. You develop your app through the browser, then deploy your app through the browser and map the app to your domain / URL (or embed the app in your site) - It's your app. Oh, and you get IE, Firefox and Safari cross-browser compat taken care of too - you build your app once and it just works in these three browsers. Sweet.
Bungee Connect includes a whole code share and team collaboration concept. You can keep your code proprietary, or you can share it with other Bungee Connect developers in your workgroup or with the wider Bungee Connect developer community. There's a lot more to this than I can cover here and I'll be writing a lot more on this soon, but I like how Mat Asay described the community aspect as a 'Sourceforge for the 21st Century'.
Bungee Connect allows developers to leverage the world of web APIs. We've been working with the API engineering and evangelist teams at Amazon, Ebay, Google, Microsoft Windows Live, PayPal, RealNetworks, Salesforce.com and Yahoo! to ensure Bungee Connect works sweetly with the multitude of their rich APIs (both WS* and RESTful). The aim is to ensure Bungee Connect can work with any web service that you choose and by working with these teams and their APIs in developing Bungee Connect, we've got a great test-bed to make sure we can achieve this goal.
Bungee Connect is No Fee for the developer to use in developing and testing Bungee-powered apps. You only pay once you've deployed your app commercially or unrestricted. We expect this to be US$1 per computer-network-interaction-hour, billed monthly. Again, more on this later.

And there's so much more. Tomorrow, anyone attending Web 2.0 Expo will be able to get hands on with Bungee Connect. We've got a booth with PCs (Windows, Macs and Linux) with the browser open (IE, Firefox and Safari) where you run through some tutorials and judge for yourself if you think we're all smoking crack (see pics below - no crack, just the booths). We'll also be updating the site with screencasts and plenty more details and Martin will be presenting and demo'ing with Brad on Wednesday morning. And by then I'm sure David might have something more to say too...

To underline a couple of points here: we're not live yet. We go into Beta in May and are looking for web developers who ideally already have experience in progamming against the APIs of the companies I mentioned earlier. So sign up if that sounds like you...

---

Update:

Dana Gardner has written up his thoughts on Bungee Connect.
Short but sweet mention on Mashable.com by Pete Cashmore.

Update 2 (4/18/07)

Richard MacManus blogged it over at Read/Write Web
Ryan Stewart blogged us too :-)

Scalability at Amazon (notes)

alexbarnett — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 13:17:00 GMT

Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon.com spoke at Supernova 2006 on the topic of Scalability at Amazon and the talk is available as a podcast at IT Conversations (thanks to James Governor for the link).

I made some notes as I listened this morning and thought I'd share:

A services business. Amazon.com is a platform. NBA.com is an application built on Amazon.com
If your online business is successful and you experience a 1000-fold increase in traffic you want your site to stay up! Building, operating and maintaining infrastructure that can be ‘always on’ and scale and is hard. Wouldn't it be nice to pay-as-you-go, rather than investing your capital up-front?
You need infrastructure that can incrementally scale. In 1995 Amazon.com had 1m books in its catalogue. That was the beginning. Now it has 35 different stores, not just books. Growing our business is not just a matter of buying bigger databases. Amazon has gone beyond that point.
Internally, Amazon is now a completely service oriented architecture (SOA).
A single Amazon.com page is made up of 100 to 150 individual web services.
What does 'scalability' actually mean? It means that if you add resources to the system the performance needs to increase proportional to the resources that you’ve added. Many of the academic algorithms don’t work like this. Many of the two-phase commit traditional transactional stuff doesn’t work like this. In general, the load on the network relevant to the application increases more than the magnitude of n. It doesn’t mean just handling more requests, it also means handling larger datasets. It needs to be able to add nodes to the system to achieve fault tolerance. It means that if you add bigger nodes you should be able to take advantage of more processing and more memory. It means that the more bigger nodes you add, the fewer people you require to actually maintain them and that as you add more nodes that system should not become more unstable. It means being more cost effective.
Target came to us and asked 'we really love what you've done with Amazon - can you do that for us?' Our interaction with Target made us realize we could become a platform rather than just a single application. Different sets of Amazon Enterprise web services: content generation and discoverability; identity; inventory management; fulfillment and customer service; order processing, payment and fraud protection. You can mix and mash these services.
Those services that are consumed by partners are guaranteed as 'always on'.
Cost effectiveness is scale.
Unexpected uses and applications built on top of our web services that we couldn't predict.
Our goal was expose all the atomic pieces that Amazon was really good at and to do that at scale and as web services.