Here’s a snippet from Dion Hinchcliffe’s Enterprise Web 2.0 blog. I think it’s a really good posting and a great way of categorizing mashup styles.
Remember — an Enterprise Mashup can also fall under any of these categories.
» Is IBM making enterprise mashups respectable? | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com
The 5 styles of mashups Accepting that information, visuals, and software can be remixed and combined at multiple levels in an application stack means that there are (at least) five places that mashups can take place. These five styles are:
- Presentation Mashup: This is the shallowest form of mashup in the sense that underlying data and functionality don’t meet. Information and laout is retrieved and either remix or just placed next to each other. Many of the Ajax desktops today fall into this category and so do portals and other presentation mashup techniques.
- Client-Side Data Mashup: A slight deeper form of mashup is the data mashup which takes information from remote Web services, feeds, or even just plain HTML and combines it with data from another source. New information that didn’t exist before can result such as when addresses are geocoded and display on a map to create a visualization that could exist without the underlying combination of data.
- Client-Side Software Mashup: This is where code is integrated in the browser to result in a distinct new capability. While a component model for the browser is only now being hashed out as part of Open Ajax, there is considerable potential in being able to easily wire together pieces of browser-based software into brand new functionality.
- Server-Side Software Mashup: Recombinant software is probably easier right now on the server since Web services can more easily use other Web services and there are less security restrictions and cross domain issues. As a result, server-side mashups like those that in turn use things like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk or any of the hundreds of open Web APIs currently available, are quite common.
- Server-Side Data Mashup: Databases have been linking and connecting data for decades, and as such, they have relatively powerful mechanisms to join or mashup data under the covers, on the server-side. While it’s still harder to mashup up data across databases from different vendors, products like Microsoft SQL Server increasingly make it much easier to do. This points out that many applications we have today are early forms of mashups, despite the term. Of course, the more interesting and newer aspects of mashups happen above this level.
