Mashups – Lotus Mashups

By Mohamed Khiasudeen

Mashups comes into picture when there is a demand in today’s global environment, a web site that should have the power of drawing upon content and functionality retrieved from external data sources with no organizational boundaries. Mashups are of-course a new bread of web based integrating data from the applications that spread across the entire internet. In this artcle i shall discuss a new upcoming product from IBM – Lotus Mashups, which is planned to be released in midyear 2008 and IBM plans subject to change.

Mashups Architecture

A Mashup application architecturally consists of API/content providers, the mashup site, and the client's Web browser. These are three different participants which are physically and logically separate.

The API/content providers

These are providers of the content that need to be mashed. Web protocols like web services, REST and RSS/Atom can be used for facilating data retrieval from different providers. Screen scrapping technique is widely used for extracting non exposed content from government and public domain web sites.

The Mashup Site

Mashup logic resides in this site but not necessarily executed from this site. Mashups can be implemented using the traditional web applications using the standard technologies like java servlets, CGI, PHP/ASP. Also mashups can be triggered from the clients browser itself using client side scripting – applets and Java scripting. The advantage of client-side mashups reduces overhead on the mashup server and faster in refreshing without the need to refresh the entire page. Google Maps API is an example of client-side technology.

Clients Web Browser

Graphical rendering and user interaction take place here as mashups often use client-side logic to assemble and compose the mashed content


Integration Challenges

Mashup developers face the same challenges of say for example integrating legacy data sources to generate dashboards. Deriving shared semantic meaning between heterogeneous data sets is a challenge here and for this translation logic need to be designed between discrete data models.

Lotus Mashups

Lotus Mashups provides the simplest and fastest way to assemble enterprise and Web content into simple, flexible, and dynamic applications. With Lotus Mashups, web-savvy business users can easily create and share new applications that address their immediate business needs.


Lotus Mashups includes:

- Browser based rich graphical tool which support assembly of new web applications by business users

- Catalog – Mashup, which enables sharing and discovery of assets with in-built features as tagging, commenting and rating

- Lightweight Mashup server can be hosted on variety of different platforms for added IT management and governance capabilities

- Built-in rich set out of the box business –ready widgets

Lotus Mashups Architecture

Following describes the proposed Lotus Notes Mashups Architecture, which may get changed by IBM when the product is released.

Key Benefits – Lotus Mashups

- Empowering knowledge workers and web developers to rapidly create new web applications, unleashing productivity and reducing IT backlog.

- Speeding up development and reduce costs through lightweight integration, reuse, and sharing.

- Quickly uncovering new business insights by easily assembling information from multiple sources on the glass.

- Aligning IT and business through rapid prototyping in a better way.

- Enabling SOA more business-relevant and visible, increasing reuse of services and widgets.

- Fostering innovation, while applying the appropriate levels of IT control.

Extend Reach and Value of SOA

- Illuminating the value of SOA to business users by making it more visible

- Driving the creation of well designed services

- Increasing services reuse

- Making SOA simple to use

Mohamed Khiasudeen is a Consultant at Wipro Technologies.He has worked on architecting collaboration, groupware and messaging solutions involving IBM products and technologies