Popfly, an enterprise-ready environment for end-user-driven mashups?

Popfly features programmable blocks using JavaScript is at the moment not very integrated with the .NET framework-based technologies. Popfly is an example of evolving technologies that exploit the power of combining mashups and Web 2.0.

Initially, the Popfly environment will mostly target public Web users, but it has the potential to become an enterprise-ready environment for end-user-driven mashups. By “Enterprise ready”, I mean that the Popfly environment and block portfolio is managed as an enterprise repository containing assets to enable end-user composite application building. The potential benefits are compelling and with Popfly, Microsoft joins product such as Yahoo (Pipes), IBM (QEDwiki), Oracle (WebCenter) and BEA Systems (Aqualogic Ensemble) in the mashup tool market.

Popfly is primarily interesting in two ways:

1. The Silverlight-based user interface is powerful, engaging, and sufficiently easy to use that non-developer users can get involved in building composite applications. Users make mashup applications by usings the build-in blocks library, or build their own blocks. These blocks can be service-oriented architecture (SOA) services. The blocks may include visualization service blocks or data service blocks, and the application can also demonstrate a block that handles transformation between two other blocks. Popfly goes far beyond dropping a gadget into a Web portal.
2. Popfly is also a mashup Web 2.0 community, applying the "network effect" to the mashup world. A user-driven mashup composite application environment is only as valuable as the quality and quantity of services (or blocks) available to users. Users can think of the Popfly community as a "programmable Web" that allows developers and nondevelopers to easily find, consume, create, rate, sell and share blocks and mashups. Popfly's success on the public Web will depend on Microsoft's ability to engage and develop this community.

© Copyright 2007, Tomas Elfving