Adding Ajax

Summarizing Mashups

Creating mashups is like creating any Ajax application (or any other kind of application) in that there's more to the effort than just code (though the code can be considerable). One of the biggest risk factors associated with Ajax applications is an unwillingness to drop an original idea when it proves overly difficult to implement or not practical. There's a strong belief that developers can code their way around any problem, and maybe that's true, but it doesn't necessarily mean the application is going to be any good once you've gone through the pain.

Another risk factor has to do with trying to manage accessibility and all the Ajax goodness within one page or a group of pages. Most Ajax effects complement a page's regular functionality. However, for larger applications or applications where much of the page is built and maintained by JavaScript, you're usually better off just splitting off the script-free versions of the application. If you do this, you'll probably find that you've only had to create a third of the code and have created a more maintainable application.

I hope this chapter demonstrates how much fun it is to pull in all these various services into one single mashup. When exploring public services, such as those listed at sites like http://programmableweb.com and http://mashup.com, the only difficulty is in trying to decide which services to try first and finding out how many we can pull together before someone grabs the keyboard from our hands ...