Robert Siebeck, Till Janner, Christoph Schroth, Volker Hoyer, Wolfgang Woerndl and Florian Urmetzer on Cloud-based Enterprise Mashup Integration Services for B2B Scenarios.
In this first talk of the 2nd International Workshop on Mashups, Enterprise Mashups and Lightweight Composition on the Web at the WWW conference (WWW 2009), Volker Hoyer (a colleague from SAP Research in St-Gallen) talks about patterns to integrate information resources (e.g. an ERP) and generic cloud services (e.g. storage) in the context of enterprise computing.
Enterprise mashups are web resources that combine other web resources that have a business relevance, but unlike traditional compositions mashups can be created by end-users using simple editors. For Volker Enterprise Mashups can be represented in a 3-layers architecture, we first have Resources (e.g. APIs to ERPs, information systems, etc.) these APIs are consumed by Gadgets which are basically visual representations (screens, graphs, maps) and building blocks (piping, flow, aggregates, etc.) consuming the resources’ API. Finally we have the actual mashups which often occur in an online editor
where the gadgets are combined together to create a new ad-hoc application.
Volker explains how resources should also go beyond APIs to enterprise information systems to also include services from the cloud such as storage, asynchronous queues, hosting, etc. In particular in their prototype they use the Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3, SQS, etc.)
As an example they demonstrate a promotion request system where a company A creates requests for promotions that other companies can accept to fulfill. When say company B wants to read the requests from A it can do it by extracting an Atom feed built from a storage cloud service at Amazon fed by company A.
Finally, Volker talks introduces the FAST project which deals with mashups in the enterprise context. Note that FAST is an open project, meaning the sources are available on the web.
You can find the slides here.
