JackBe is practicing safe mashups

With cloud computing rising, mashup safety is a much larger issue

Today JackBe, one of the companies that innovated mashup software, announced the general availability of Presto 2.7, the spring 2009 edition of its enterprise mashup platform.

In my gigs as CTO, I always like to create a theme for a release, and the theme of this release seems to be mashup safety.

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So, what's new?Presto 2.7 includes Wires, the Presto Visual Mashup Composer. Presto Wires controls how, when, and where mashup data is published and shared with specfic users. Moreover, Wires allows business users to define mashup macros that provide customized transformative actions for highly personalized, contextual mashups. Also, Wires is able to detect malicious code.

In the recent past, even the mere mention of mashups have sent CSOs running for their firewalls. In many instances, mashups can cause some security issues, such as those mashups that extract sensitive and secure data, and re-expose that data to people and/or machines that should not be seeing it -- not good.

I suspect that JackBe has a lot of government interest (the company is based in the DC area), and perhaps that is influencing the changes found in Presto 2.7. However, it's also a good idea within traditional commercial enterprises. Moreover, as we move more toward cloud computing the use of mashups will increase exponentially, and you have to do them with some degree of assurance that information is presented to only those authorized to see it and that your mashup is not host malicious code.

Good move for JackBe, all in all.