Talk:Mashup

As a networking sort of person, except for specialized applications, I look forward to an introduction or at least a definition. IIRC, a fry-up is an English breakfast, so maybe a mashup involves electronic transmission of breakfast potatoes? Howard C. Berkowitz 22:54, 3 August 2008 (CDT)

Mashup in other fields

I wonder if this is similar to imagery intelligence#geospatial intelligence, which is the merger of imagery with precise geographic coordinates, or multispectral imaging, where, for example, visible color photographs are merged with images taken outside the visible range, but the various wavelengths combined into a "false color" image meaningful to an expert. Howard C. Berkowitz 04:06, 6 August 2008 (CDT)

John Snow, etc.

John Snow, and, independently, Florence Nightingale, are generally credited, at least in epidemiology, with introducing the idea of "business graphics" to present tables of numbers — pie charts, histograms, and the like.

So, their methods have been in use, mostly manually, for about 150 years. I'm not sure that citing their example, other than it is a general user interface example, helps me understand what is new about a mashup.

Is it something like a business intelligence dashboard (e.g., http://www.enterprise-dashboard.com/)?

So far, I see a number of analogies to things that contribute to mashups, but I still don't have any idea what are the essential qualities that make a particular user interface (I think mashup seems to be a user interface) a mashup, rather than another kind of presentation.

Howard C. Berkowitz 12:03, 6 August 2008 (CDT)

API vs. remote procedure call

This may be pedantic, but I don't think of HTTP as being either an API or a remote procedure call. The semantics are different.

Now, HTTP is clearly a client/server protocol, and, in one sense of the word, does invoke a remote service/server. That may, at the server, involve some internal procedure invocations, but invocations, in the sense of UNIX/LINUX interprocess communications or the Remote Procedure Call protocol, RFC1057 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1057.txt) RPC: Remote Procedure Call Protocol specification: Version 2. SunMicrosystems. June 1988.

To me, an HTTP API on one's own computer causes an HTTP protocol message to sent, which doesn't necessarily invoke a procedure. I think of a service as made up of a set of procedures, some of which will invoke others on the sane nachine and some (very common in large server farms) may be load-distributed among transaction/database servers. For the databases, as an example, NFS over XDR over RPC has the semantics of a remote procedure call -- but it's the RPC that imposes those semantics, not an application protocol (interface) such as NFS or HTTP.

Howard C. Berkowitz 12:36, 6 August 2008 (CDT)