My silicon valley experience

I had to do a little survey about three different mashup tools for university. Those tools where Microsoft Popfly, Google Mashup Editor and Yahoo! Pipes. I first tried Yahoo! Pipes and was really amazed how easy it is to build simple Mashups. Because it was fast and easy I decided to build a simple application with each of the three competitors. I just wanted to take two RSS-feeds and merge them to one sorted by date of publishing.

Yahoo! Pipes

I started out with Yahoo! Pipes. It turned out to be no problem at all and the outcome was really satisfying. The feed was immediatly displayed on my mashups page hosted by Yahoo! for free. I also was given a link at which the resulting feed could be read. All this took me about ten minutes including the learning phase! I immediatly showed it to my non computer scientist girlfriend who also got along with it immediatly.

Microsoft Popfly

The next candidate was Microsoft Popfly. Here the installation of Silverlight which can be compared to Adobe Flash was required. First this made some problems under Firefox but immediately was running under IE and suddenly also was working under Firefox. Why ever. I was payed back for this annoying installation by a really beautiful UI. What were simple 2D-Boxes in Pipes are nice 3D-Boxes in Popfly. It also comes with a huge environment of additional tools.

There is a pretty nice website editor called Web Creator. This can be compared to tools like Dreamweaver or Homeside. It’s only visual and you can’t influence the code but it’s really well done and worth a look at although I would never use it.

Popfly also comes with the so called Popfly space. Popfly space gives you 25 MB of space for your mashups which you can add to your page, load into your MS Visual Studio Express and change there or add as widget to your windows dashboard.

Merging the two RSS feeds took me roughly twice as long as with Yahoo! Pipe because shortly before I was done Popfly crashed. This is ok since it’s still a beta version. What I was pretty unhappy with is the outcome. I merged the two feeds and afterwards sorted them by the publishing date. But apparently Popfly sorts the dates as strings. This results in a post from February 1st being next to a post from January 1st. The good thing is that Pofly other than Pipes lets you edit the code. Since I only wanted to do a quick test I did not want to start coding for a minor thing like that. But I think that Microsoft has to get easy functions like sorting dates to work. Steve Ballmer called Popfly “a tool for end users, not necessarily codeheads,”. So they have to get this running because otherwise you have to be a codehead to get basic things done.

Google Mashup Editor

Google Mashup Editor (GME) other than the former tools does not offer you a visual tool. Here you have to code everything on your own.

The surface is like the text panels of common code editors. It offers the standard operations like copy/paste and code highlighting. In this text panel you write your well know html, CSS and Java Script tags. In addition to these Google created the GME-tags which offer specific functionalities for the purpose of setting up Mashups using this environment.

Working with the GME is way more complicated than work with the other two. This product obviously is thought for developers. I quickly realized that combining and sorting two feeds would require several hours of learning how to use the environment. That would completely be outside of the frame of my little experiment. Therefore I only read my blogs rss feed and displayed it in a nice listing. The code looks as follows:

<gm:page title="myApp"></gm:page>

<gm:list id="myList" data="http://mysiliconvalleyexperience.com/?feed=rss2" template="blog">

<gm:template id="myListTemplate">

</gm:template></gm:list>
<p repeat="true">
<gm:text ref="atom:title">

</gm:text>

Summary

I think that giving non-programmers the opportuninty to create simple mashups is a big step. Yahoo! Pipes in my eyes had the easiest to use and best working interface. But there are to limmited components you can use for your mashups. Nice display components for photos are a essential component that you can not find here.

Microsoft Popfly offers a bigger variety of components and allows you to edit the code which could make it also more interesting for programmers. But I would still not use it since it requires Silverlight which so far probably nobody has installed. If it was using Flash this would be the tool! GME does not aim towards consumers since it requires real programming work. Of the three compared tools this is for sure the one that gives you the most options. But since none of the three tools allows you to write server side code or create a database I have no idea why a real programmer should use the GME. If I have to write code why shouldn’t I write a page using my favorite language in my favorite editor but use GME? Google hosts the mashup for free which is nice but in my eyes does not compensate for the handicaps which come with it. Popfly and Pipes allow me to click mashups together very fast which is also interesting for serious programmers just for speed reasons. I could imagine to aggregate two RSS feeds and use them in a application I wrote myself. But I can’t see any serious application being done with any of these three platforms. You will need server side code and a DB for every serious application I can think of.
Overall this is a interesting development and I am curious what will come out of this.