Mashup FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions - Portals
- Is the data that is output by this system, universal? Can I take the data and make more mashups on a variety of systems or does it only work with your software?
- What BPM tools are compatible with Presto and are there any cloud based BPM?
- Can you only pull live data in via XLS files, or from SOA, JDBC, API, etc. and if you can, how?
- JSR-168 is nice, but it doesn't help me as an ASP.NET developer. Is there support for displaying mashlets in ASP.NET apps?
- Can we place these mashups in portal pages/pda, if so, how much customization do i need to do?
- Can I display a mashlet within a Silverlight control/application?
- What is the deliverable to the client? A mashup? Mashlet? I'm trying to understand how the application dev process changes in a mashup architecture.
- Can you please review what the outcome are of the mashup? RSS / GRID / CHART anything else? .. HTML?
- How the Mashups are being handled for different devices display capacity (PC, iPhone, Blackberries, etc)?
- Can widgets only be viewed on web browsers or is there support for programmatically accessing widget data from .NET or Java?
- How does the protocol (transport or security) conversion happen? Is the developer responsible for it or does the mashup platform take care of it? What i meant was when we talk about using the same mashup on different platforms/channels.
- Could you try and differentiate the mashups from traditional portlets?
- How do you assess the accuracy or reliability of the source data. How do you know you aren't being fed false data? What ESB security are you using.
- Have you seen successful mashup deployment on Force.com platform?
- How can Mashups, Wikis and CMSs be combined to take advantages of the strengths of each?
- A lot of these use cases seems to be very “read” centric. How many use cases are there for updates of information, and what facilities (if any) are available for assured delivery / “transaction coordination” of the data update?
- The value (and potential risk) of disparate information sources may be larger than the sum of the parts. (your competitive analysis pattern) Are there any design patterns (or tools) for service providers to understand how their information is being used (in perhaps anticipated ways).
- What about how reliable an external resource can be if it's not under your control? What if Google suddenly changes their api or interface or eliminates it?
- So JackBe in not a ‘front end’. You are used for backend and data fusion?
- Can the widgets developed in JackBe be embedded into standard portal solutions like Sun or do then need to be accessed via the JackBe UI?
- What would it take to automatically update one mashlet based on input from another. We just saw an example that did not update.
- Can a badly-written mashlet hang other mashlets on the portal page?
- But the developer is still responsible for visual formatting so it fits different platforms (web, wireless devices etc) - right?
- Are enterprise Mashups portable to different web/application/mashup servers?
- What is widget or gadget w.r.t Mashups?
- What is the difference between a mashup and a Portal? Don't they both just collect disparate data and present it in one central area?
- Do you have samples of public administrations having applied mashups technologies on their websites/portals? (e.g. providing services to their citizens)
- Does Presto integrate into other portal platoforms, e.g. Webcenter?
- So the Wires env is the runtime and each user will need to have it installed ? Is there a runtime env that runs in a browser ?
- Can I display a mashlet within a Silverlight control/application?
- The mashlet UI support OOTB is simply but has limited features, right? e.g., it's not possible if the users want to define some drag and drop features with JavaScript?
- How do you compare the Enterprise Mashups with Portals? Do Mashups replace Portals?
- Say we have a legacy app that is written in VB code that wraps multiple web browsers. The web browsers actually call different java ear files; plus the VB code invokes java web services via SOAP. Could we "rewrite" this app as mashlets using the basic underlying java services and publish the "package" to a browser? Or basically simplify this legacy app plus make it customizable by adding new mashups?
- Given that enterprise mashups are created by everyday users, are there any user interface (UI) related best practices or guidelines for building these mashups?
- Are any industry standards emerging for a component model for these visual “widgets” that may be assembled on a mashup page, or shared across mashup platforms?
- Many of these websites that are data sources are Ajax-based, hence pages created on the fly. Can Mashup tools harness Ajax based websites as well?
- The Mashup Server concept looks similar to Portal Server pattern.
- Portals were a big head-ache for our Company. Portals made our elevations times much longer; the upgrades were painful; it had big performance issues, just to name a few of the problems. We invested a lot in time and money into the portal product, then had to backout. We ended up using "tried-n-true" servlet technology to do the same thing. Tell me why a Mashup Platform like Presto will be any different from a maintenance and elevation perspective?
- There are some benefits to portals e.g. governance. Do you see portals as a way to deliver mashups?
- How does this compare in construct and operation to the Portal/Portlet style of web page composition.
- What charting package(s) do you use? Is there an available list of the specific chart types available? Is it possible to extend the existing chart set with 3rd party charting packages?
- Can Mashups pull specific portions from Seibel eCRM, both from Seibel portal and/or data inside Seibel (oracle database)?
- Can you discuss your view on difference between (if any) a WSRP/JSR168 compliant portlet with a composite service behind it?
- What is the secret behind the mashlet being able to run in J2EE and .Net containers e.g. BEA Portal and SharePoint portal?
- Is Presto Server able to integrate with Oracle Webcenter / Oracle (BEA) Portal /PeopleSoft - Portal?
- Will it cost a whole bunch to connect to SAP systems?
- Do you have connectors to sources such as OLAP cubes?
- How are mashups different from dashboards that have been around for a while?
- How does it integrate with SAP ERP and SAP BI? Do we need additional connectors to talk to SAP?
- Our firm is not going to go out and scrape info from the web. How about an example where internally we can mashup mainframe data, existing java webservice calls via SOAP, and data from an excel spreadsheet! Is this possible with the mashup platform?
- Mashups seem well suited for information centric / lightweight BI applications, but how do these solutions evolve over time or provide enterprise capabilities for inclusion of more complex business logic, or support for business processes, rules, event processing, etc.
- I don't understand the BI, we know that excel is THE solution used by the business users to do their job. I have difficulties to see mashups helping in any way?!?
- How does a mashup compare to business intelligence?
- Will the future of BI be mashups rather than the traditional data warehouse, marts, and access tools like cognos.
- Can you only pull live data in via XLS files, or from SOA, JDBC, API, etc. and if you can, how?
- I don't see any difference, so far, between SOA and mashups. Many SOA vendors also provide Portals to work with SOA services. (and business users who know the data are responsible for their services).
