Bash Ups
With the release to public beta of Popfly, Microsoft’s mashup editor, I’ll reiterate my theory that mashups are the UNIX shell of the Internet. The corollary is that we need a suite of command equivalents:
| Command | Mashup Alternative |
| cd, mkdir, rmdir | facilities for manipulating “current URI”; REST principles, etc. |
| mailx | messaging transformations and transports: mail, IM, SMS, twitter, etc. |
| man | ? |
| jobs, ps, kill, sleep, etc. | facilities for multiple mashup control |
| ls | spidering facilities / robust HTML parsing, etc. “Get-ChildItem” in all its polymorphic complexity. |
| who | FOAF |
| finger, chfn | blogging |
| cat, sed, sort, grep, wc, tail, etc. | All sorts of facilities for transformation of source to sink |
Right now, everyone’s concentrating on what output the mashup editors can produce or what the component manipulation looks like. I think the winner of the mashup evolution will be the one that provides the most flexible suite of components.
