Mashup standards  |  October 30, 2009  

I was reading SD Times the other day while riding an exercise bike at the gym (hey, you have to do something to keep your mind occupied) and I came across an article on the Open Mashup Alliance. I had quite a number of questions about the OMA. Although it is not really a standards body, OMA is working to create a standard for the creation of mashups.

This standard is called Enterprise Markup Mashup Language (EMML).

"EMML is a Domain Specific Language (DSL) that was designed specifically to address the important characteristics that make mashups easier to create and reuse:

• EMML is not meant to be a General Purpose Language and does not compete with them. In fact, EMML was designed to be complimentary to and integrated with popular languages like JavaScript, Java, Groovy, Ruby and others.
• EMML is a declarative XML-based language and, as such, leverages and complements existing XML capabilities inherent in XQuery, XPath, and XSLT.
• EMML has been in development for several years. It also has already been tested in dozens of real-world production mashup implementations.
• EMML is an open language specification. This type of common and free-to-use language (and technologies that embed or use it) have a much better chance of meeting the needs of enterprise developers than a proprietary language."

I was surprised and pleased to see that HP was a member, working on this. I guess I'll have to track those folks down.

There are some people who view this consortium positively,  while others are a bit more cautious. Mashups have become a standard technique to generate useful information from various sources across an enterprise or a business. Even though formal mashups are relatively immature, having a standards effort should help improve the quality and predictability of results. It's definitely something I'll keep watching.

Charlie Bess
The Next Big Thing blog