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But why are enterprise mashups important?

I've had discussions with a number of enterprise architects currently working in the industry about this and I do see a common theme in many of the IT requests they get these days.  There seems to be considerable pent-up demand for smaller, custom applications in large numbers.  The solution space around large enterprise apps is increasingly well-bounded; almost all enterprises today already have their mainline IT systems well developed and evolved.  The remaining IT projects are often the ones in which the investment for traditional tools and processes would not justify the return.  And based on these anecdotal discussions, there seems to be a sort of Long Tail of IT software demand, something both Rod Boothby and I have been discussing this year.  If true, it is just possible that there is a vast amount of untapped value left in IT yet.  We just need tools to access it.

The main attraction of mashups is that they have the potential for self-service in that end-users can theoretically create them.  They also perform integration in the browser.  This provides a sort of safe "sandbox" where users can experiment safely with powerful tools without affecting the traditional IT development, deployment, and support processes.   And presumably, enterprise mashups tools would provide automatic versioning, security, and other needed enterprise software qualities. 

Dogear: An Example of REST

REST specifies that a given resource be represented
by a stable URI (uniform resource identifier), such that the same URI will
mean the same thing over time. This implies that the current state of an
application must depend entirely on the URI, and not on opaque, hidden conditions
such as cookies. The dogear application state consists of a set of constraints
on which bookmarks are currently visible, an output format, a current page
number, and the number of links per page.

Output Format

The first element of a dogear URL path selects the desired
output format. Currently implemented formats include:

* /html—the Web site itself
* /rss—RSS 2.02
* /atom—Atom 1.03
* js—a JavaScript snippet, which, when evaluated, causes HTML to be emitted on the including page
* /xbel—the XML Bookmark Exchange Language4 

Each of the machine-readable formats is extended, via XML namespaces, to
include dogear-specific meta-data.

Programmatic read/write access to one’s own bookmarks is provided by
an HTTP API, which resides at /api. Bookmarks are created and modified via
HTTP POST using simple name=value query parameters to provide bookmark title,
URL, and tags. Bookmarks may be deleted by calling /api?url=url with HTTP
DELETE.