AltioLive enabling the enterprise mashup

The AltioLive product provides both server side and client side architecture. This enables a secure load balanced mechanism to deliver data to and from a client. The client can be a user interface or another system.

What does this have to do with AltioLive? It has been the belief at Altio for a long time that a mashup does not have to be visual, but can be associated with data as well. For effective delivery of business solutions a product needs to be able to deliver data from multiple originating sources and the user should not need to know or understand the source of the data. AltioLive provides composite components to create visual business solutions and on the server side aggregated data feeds, this provides an effective mechanism to deliver browser based applications that interact with data from multiple sources.

A recent article in SD Times by David Linthicum provides a good overview of this, with the visual mashup described as

"the ability to change the manner in which a visual interface behaves by mashing it up with other content or services"
(Software Development Times, June 15 2008, page 37)

The article describes a non-visual mashup as 

"the mashing up of two or more services to create a combined application, or integration point to service a business process".  (Software Development Times, June 15 2008, page 37)

AltioLive composite controls enable a designer to take several existing components and package them together as a new business component or enterprise mashup widget. This means a library of re-usable components can soon grow and result in reduced development time for future solutions.

The AltioLive aggregated data feed provides a simple yet powerful workflow for retrieving data from disparate data sources. It is possible to use data attributes from one source as a parameter for the retrieval of data from another data source, execute multiple request in parallel or sequentially and stop execution if a failure occurs. This is the non-visual mashup.

Whatever you want to call this approach the ultimate aim is to deliver an application that makes the end user more effective in delivering business benefit as quickly as possible, without losing sight of maintainability.

The key factors of SOA/enterprise mashups as described in the article are:

• the ability to place volatility into a single domain, thus allowing for changes and for agility
• The ability to leverage services, both for information and behavior.
• The ability to bind together many back-end systems, making new and innovative uses of the systems.

This is something Altio continues to deliver through the AltioLive product as innovative ideas.

 (This article was originally posted to http://www.altio.com )