eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
JackBe is looking to bring enterprise mashups to the business user with widgets called “Mashlets.”
The company is expected to announce Presto 2.0, the new version of its enterprise mashup platform, April 22 at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.
Click Here to Watch the Latest eWEEK Newsbreak Video.
“We’re pushing this release closer to the user,” John Crupi, chief technology officer at JackBe, said in an interview with eWEEK. “Version 1.0 was about getting the platform in place; 2.0 is about the openness and opening up where I publish to.”
New features in Presto 2.0 include mashup support for a variety of enterprise products including Microsoft Excel, Hewlett-Packard SOA Systinet, Adobe Flash and Flex, Sun Microsystems’ Java and JMaki, and corporate portals, including Oracle, IBM and JBoss.
Mashups: Are they an IT nightmare? Read more here.
Crupi said Presto Mashlets can be created in a single click. He described them as portable and sharable tools for analyzing sales data, tracking competitive information, performing professional research, completing enterprise risk analysis, supporting sales or client prospecting, improving customer service, or providing fast access to any other kind of dynamic, time-sensitive data directly to business users.
Presto Mashlets also provide collaboration to the enterprise, enabling users to share them through enterprise portals, blogs, wikis and e-mail, he said.
Crupi said Presto 2.0 includes a number of APIs, including Java, JavaScript, C# and REST (Representational State Transfer) APIs for developers to better leverage the Presto platform.
JackBe added Excel support to Presto “for the financial industry,” he added. “They live and die in Excel. We have stories of customers with 5,000 to 6,000 Excel spreadsheets and 500 developers maintaining them, so we built an Excel connector.”
Presto 2.0 provides several other features for business users and mashup developers, including enhancements to the Presto Wires Mashup Composer to further simplify the creation of mashups. In addition to the bidirectional Mashup Connector to Microsoft Excel, Presto 2.0 features other ways for mashup developers to bring mashups into their enterprise, including a Mashup Composer plug-in for Eclipse, a Mashup Connector for HP SOA Systinet, enhancements to the Presto Enterprise Mashup Markup Language (EMML), and a Mashup Connector API for AJAX, Flash/Flex, Java, JMaki and C# developers, the company said.
“The widget phenomenon is picking up steam,” Crupi said. “There is a growing ecosystem of mashlets and mashups.”
With JackBe’s Mashup Studio-an Eclipse-based mashup creation environment that uses EMML-developers can develop more and different types of mashups, he said.
“We think we have a lot of opportunity in the enterprise to not just scale these things called mashups, but to syndicate them,” Crupi said.
With Presto 2.0, JackBe also is introducing the Enterprise Mashup Sandbox, a free community for mashup creation, sharing and rating at www.jackbe.com/sandbox.
At the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Las Vegas on April 8, JackBe launched its Presto Mashup Ready program and announced 12 partners. The JackBe Presto Mashup Ready program is composed of a network of partners spanning four areas: governance partners, interface partners, enabler partners and integrator partners, the company said.