IBM posted on its alphaWorks site Tuesday its IBM Mashup Starter Kit, which is a preview of a Web 2.0-based mashup platform for business professionals.Geared to enterprise usage, the toolkit enables users to assemble Web 2.0 mashup applications and solve business problems without aid from IT specialists, the company said. IBM with the preview seeks user feedback; a general release of the product is planned for the first quarter of 2008, said David Boloker, chief technology officer in the IBM Emerging Internet Technology Software Group. Mashup Starter Kit is intended for both line-of-business professionals and IT persons, Boloker said when interviewed at the ZendCon conference in Burlingame, Calif. on Tuesday morning.“What we’re aiming for is someone who is in the line of business or in IT can build a next-generation user appplication and that user application would have all the paradigms of what’s considered a Web 2.0 application,” including drag-and-drop capabilities and a much more vibrant UI, said Boloker. Various components could be dragged and dropped onto a screen, including RESTful services or ATOM feeds, he said. The US EPA used Mashup Maker to develop an application to theoretically track Avian flu, Boloker said. The kit consists of two technologies: IBM Mashup Hub, which is a mashup server storing information feeds such as RSS and ATOM, and QEDWiki, providing a user interface for non-IT users to mash information from any data source.Mashup Hub and QEDWiki are Web applications written in PHP and running on Apache Server. The two components use a database to manage assets and user-specific structured data. The interface uses the Dojo toolkit and the AreaEdit WYSIWYG editor. Internally, the applications use REST (Representational State Transfer), AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). IBM’s kit can combine information from databases, departmental information, personal information or the Web, IBM said. Information and Web services can be blended, including weather reports or maps and enterprise content and services. “I look at this [as being] akin to what was done with spreadsheets 20 years ago,” in which CFOs were given the power to take information and manage it, said Boloker. Software Development