JackBe readies Presto Wires mashup composer

Raising the stakes in the burgeoning mashup development tools field, JackBe is unveiling Presto Wires, a visual enterprise mashup composer, at the AJAXWorld conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Monday.

The tool functions with the company’s Presto Edge mashup server, which offers secure access to disparate data and services. Users of Presto Wires, who would be business analysts as well as developers, can integrate Web services via a drag-and-drop workflow. These could be services based on REST, WSDL, RSS, and SOAP as well as services produced from SOA infrastructure. Services can be gathered from such sources as RSS feeds, maps from Google, and research data.

“[Presto Wires] gives enterprise users the ability to mash these different Web services together with minimal or no support from IT [and] with all the security and governance that larger enterprises expect,” Chor-Ching Fan, vice president of product management at JackBe, said.

JackBe defines mashups as applications integrating two or more data services and allowing users to specify how the data is mashed up, such as stipulating how columns of data are to be joined.

“The main benefit [of mashups] is to allow business units to solve ad hoc business issues,” said Fan. Presto Wires can access public Web services and integrate them with internal data sources to look for business opportunities.

Presto Wires allows enterprises, including business units and non-technical people, to leverage SOA investments and combine data sets and business rules, according to JackBe.

“Many enterprises have made major investments into SOA, and they cannot deliver the value and benefits of SOA without allowing the business units to do mashups on their own,” Fan said.

“Presto is providing the way that business users can take advantage of the SOA investments,” made in the past five to 10 years, he said.

An analyst compared Presto Wires to a Yahoo technology.

“JackBe’s Presto Wires resembles data mashup construction environments like Yahoo Pipes, which is focused on the consumer Web space,” said analyst Vishwanath Venugopalan of The 451 Group. “Yahoo Pipes operates almost entirely on syndicated Internet data feeds (RSS, Atom, etc.) Presto Wires offers business users a chance to expand the scope of these data mashups to traditional enterprise data sources such as spreadsheets and Web services.”

While JackBe leverages AJAX to provide for more intuitive, user-friendly mashup creation, no programming is required. Users can drag and drop objects.

Presto Wires carries a list price of $40,000 per CPU.