ProgrammableWeb Embraces OpenSearch

Companies Leverage OpenSearch Specification to Simplify the Lifecycle of Mashups



SEATTLE, WA .-ProgrammableWeb, the leading Web 2.0 repository for mashup applications and enabling APIs, today announced that it has integrated support for the OpenSearch protocol and completed integration testing with IBM’s (NYSE: IBM) mashup maker, QEDWiki. This collaboration between ProgrammableWeb and IBM allows business users to easily explore, discover, install and publish mashup consumables such as APIs, widgets and feeds.

As mashups continue to gain prevalence with corporate users, the pioneers who are mixing their business data with information outside the firewall need a catalogue of approved content they can introduce to their secure environments. ProgrammableWeb addresses this need with an online directory service and developer portal that provides a platform for discovering and publishing the essential components of mashup applications.

OpenSearch (www.opensearch.org) is a Web 2.0 specification based on the Atom Publishing Protocol. Search clients, such as IBM’s QEDWiki, can use OpenSearch description documents to learn about the public interface of a search engine such as ProgrammableWeb’s directory of mashup consumables. These description documents contain templates that indicate how the search client should make search requests. Search engines can use OpenSearch to add search metadata to results in a variety of content formats.

“Through the support of OpenSearch, developers can now search and contribute to our community using their favorite mashup maker,” said John Musser, founder of ProgrammableWeb. “Our collaboration with IBM has delivered a seamless handshake between our respective company technologies and has enabled the content listed on our web site to be more broadly and easily consumed.”

“Mashup components such as feeds, widgets and APIs are the core artifacts of the mashup ecosystem. These resources need to be published, discovered and consumed to enable the creation of new situational applications,” explains Dan Gisolfi, Executive IT Architect, IBM Emerging Internet Technology. “OpenSearch has enabled us to quickly implement search and contribution features for the lifecycle of mashup consumables between our own assets and with partners like ProgrammableWeb.”

IBM’s recently announced Mashup Starter Kit is preconfigured with the OpenSearch protocol necessary for users to take immediate advantage of this collaboration effort. Additionally, participants the Business Mashup Challenge at the upcoming Mashup Camp event in Europe (www.mashupcamp.com) will be able to use IBM’s Mashup Starter Kit to:

* Explore and discover widgets and mashups on ProgrammableWeb’s directory server
* Install and consume widgets from ProgrammableWeb in new mashup applications
* Post comments and ratings to ProgrammableWeb’s directory server
* Publish new widgets and mashup applications to ProgrammableWeb’s directory server

ZDNet executive editor and Mashup Camp organizer David Berlind offered this observation about the IBM and ProgrammableWeb collaboration on his blog: “...their reliance on the Creative Commons-licensed OpenSearch instead of some proprietary interface for exchanging structured data in the context of a free text search could be a huge evolutionary step forward for not just the mashup ecosystem, but for the software development ecosystem on the whole which, over time, will come to rely more and more on functionality and data through API-accessible services.”