May 23rd, 2006

We're less than a month away from the New York PHP Conference. And what better time to explore enterprise mashups. We're pleased to have David Boloker, CTO of Emerging Technology in the IBM Software Group, and his team back to discuss how PHP can be used to enable the building and running of situational applications.

Do you buy into the hype around mashups? Given the maturation of SOA, could there be merit in the recent ramp up of a mashup ecosystem? Consider the predicted yearly growth rate of over 900 new mashups a year. The listing of hundreds of such Web 2.0 composite applications on The Programmable Web also factors into the viability of this emerging web technology. Assuming that the ad-hoc situational aspects of mashups are here to say, what will the new breed of mashup developers require from a web application runtime?

Developing humongous applications that try to solve many possible situations of a given subject domain is no longer the prudent approach for web based solutions. Now it is more efficient to enable application users with the ability to establish flexible ad-hoc short-term applications that adapt to the needs of the moment quickly and easily.

A Situation Application is a web application that meets the following criteria:

• It is rapidly created to address an immediate need of an individual or community.


• It is a Just-in-time solution that is typically but not necessarily short-lived.


• It is informal thus lacking product quality look and feel.


• It provides a "just good enough" solution as opposed to a generalized solution.

A Mashup can be a form of a Situation Application that yields a new utility by seamlessly combining content from more than one sources into an integrated experience. Mashups are comprised of 2 or more disparate components that are bound together through content.

Join us this month as we hear from David Boloker, CTO of Emerging Technology in the IBM Software Group. David and his team will present IBM's PHP based Wiki platform for situational applications and provide a general update on IBM's PHP strategy, contributions, and upcoming products.

The primary focus of this briefing will be IBM's introduction and demonstration of their application runtime for situational applications. Referred to by the codename, QEDWiki (more), this technology enabler seeks to improve the ways in which the knowledge worker interacts and integrates with the overwhelming amount of information they face in our fast past information driven world. QEDWiki represents a next generation Wiki which combines Do-It-Yourself IT (DIY-IT) with the flexibility of user-oriented information architecture to create an easy-to-use integration platform for rendering mashups.

QEDWiki is an application runtime environment for collaborative and situational (ad-hoc) dynamic content development. It enables quick and easy web programming and deployment of Wikis for non-programmers who are domain experts. Once the IT community sets up the basic Wiki, individual groups can quickly aggregate, deploy and collaborate based upon their requirements. As a result, minimal maintenance is required from IT.

Thanks to IBM for providing a great presentation space with seating for plenty.

As a service to our community, New York PHP UG meetings are always free and open to the public.