Mashup platform vendors

This sampling of mashup platforms runs the gamut from established portal servers to bleeding-edge Web pure plays. The list does not include commercial or open source AJAX toolkits. (See also "Enterprise mashups meet SOA.")

Above All Software Back when “mashups” applied only to music, this company created the first enterprise mashup platform. A lightweight composite app development and deployment environment, Studio, meshes with the SOA Repository for service metadata.

Adobe With improved XML support, Flex 2.0 enables developers to create real-time, data-driven Flash applications. A separate data services application provides mediated server-side messaging and data integration. Free for download if run on a single CPU.

Applibase DataMashups.com, now in beta, targets SMBs and workgroups that wish to build hosted enterprise portals combining Internet and internal data. Enables developers to mash Web services, SQL, and other data sources and apply access control to portal pages.

BEA WebLogic Portal 9.2, the latest version of BEA’s popular enterprise portal server, has a couple of relevant new features: Mashup Composition helps developers assemble composite mashup apps, and Component Producer delivers the mashup application.

Dapper Short for “data mapper.” Like Data Mashups, this is an Internet service that let’s you extract information from any website and create mashups without programming. Currently in beta and works only with HTML sources, but free and easy to use.

Kapow Technologies Mashup Server weds its own visual programming language with three modules — Clipping, Transactions, and Data Collections — for portal creation, composite app dev, and data integration. Robots scour HTML sources, with support for JavaScript events.

IBM Now available as a “free preview” hosted on the alphaWorks site, QEDWiki is a Wiki framework written in PHP that enables business users and developers to come together and build ad hoc mashup applications quickly and collaboratively.

Laszlo Systems OpenLaszlo is an open source ECMAscript platform that enables deployment of rich Internet applications to DHTML or Flash, thus competing with Adobe Flex 2. Sun’s Orbit project will also offer compilation to the Java 2 ME environment.

/n software RSSBus is a set of tools and services that enable developers to create RSS Feeds with databases, spreadsheets, and other sources, with HTML pages, Word documents, and more as targets. Reusable RSSBus Connectors convert the data into feeds.

Nexaweb The Enterprise Web 2.0 Suite builds a Universal Client Framework, which supports AJAX and Java clients, on top of an Internet Messaging Bus and Enterprise Data Services. Nexaweb Studio features visual drag-and-drop design of mashup apps.

Oracle As part of Application Server 10g release 3, the WebCenter Suite supports both AJAX and Java Server Faces and does not require Oracle’s separate Portal product. The WebCenter Services component includes Wiki, RSS, and even VoIP capability.