microformats

Predictions for 2008

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Since it is January it is more or less obligatory to write some predictions for the new year. Here are some of mine, they are not really any big predictions about major industry trends and world changing events, but I think that at least some of you might find them interesting:

  • Microsoft Live Search will be integrated into Facebook and the Microsoft-Facebook allience will start to seriously compete with Google for the search market.
  • Enterprise Mashups will be on the top of the hype cycle in the end of the year and big companies will start to seriously invest in it (and not just talk about it).
  • The Web 2.0 bubble will burst, but that really just means that some big famous companies will go bancrupt (bye bye Technorati). It won’t really have any similarities with the .com bubble, instead it will mostly be something created in the buzz obsessed blogosphere and then be writen about in mainstream media.
  • Microformats will be integrated into WordPress, Blogger, Flickr och other major sites, and be the basis for many interesting integrations and mashups.

Some predictions specific for Sweden:

  • There will be a lot of talk about mashups in Sweden, but not much action.
  • Schibstedt will try to make a Swedish social network – “a Swedish Facebook”. Be prepared for a major ad campaign.

You can find more Swedish predictions in the latest episode of the whatsnext podcast (sorry, swedish only).My last prediction is that Digitalistic soon will have a new design and a section all in Swedish, I really hope that I am not wrong about this one!

Overview of Mashups – Concepts, Technologies and what it all means (my JavaOne presentation)

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Sun has now uploaded the transcripts and audio from my JavaOne presentation about Mashups earlier this month. Both the PDF of the presentation, the audio and the transcript can now be found at the SDN’s JavaOne site. You need to be a member of the Sun Developer Network (SDN) to see it, but membership is free so don’t let that stop you.

The official title of the presentation is “Integration Gets All Mashed Up – Bridging Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 Applications”, and it is an overview of what mashups are, what technologies are involved and how the different components fit together inside a mashup. It was a lot of work getting the presentation together, but it was well worth it since I got a lot of good feedback from people (thanks to eveybody that came and heard me speak!).

The presentation starts out with the standard (= Wikipedia) definition of mashups and then move on to describing the enabling technologies such as REST, JSON, Atom and RSS. Of course all this is from a Java perspecive since it is after all a JavaOne presentation. Next are the components of a mashup such as Mashup Builders, Widgets, Mashup Enablers and how they all fit together.

Inside a Mashup

Next I describe the the mashup programming model, which is a lightweight programming model that means that the focus is on assembling and not coding. In the end I highlight what it means to be a developer in a mashup world.

If you are in too much a hurry to go through the presentation I can give you the summary right here:

  • Mashups are all about
    • Building a situational application ad hoc
    • Reuse and remix both data and funcitonality
  • Using Mashups means that
    • You can do more in less time
    • You don’t have to reinvent the wheel
    • You are not in total control of how your applications and data will be used

If you are interested in Mashups I hope that this presentation will give you a good overview. Please take a look and a listen and let me know what you think!