Social Glass

I remembered reading about Dapper last year when they were profiled on Techcrunch and thought I’d check it out again to build a demo. Dapper provides a web-based wizard tool that exposes data from virtually any website as a service (which they call a “Dapp”). For example, I’ve created a REST interface with Dapper that returns the latest information on fires burning in Victoria (it’s fire season in Australia), which you can see here, by parsing the content from the table on the Country Fire Association’s current fire page. I can now programmatically overlay this data, which includes fire severity, the number of fire trucks on scene, and fire location, on a Google Map without the CFA having to invest in creating API-based services.

And that’s the value of mashup tools like these - companies can exploit their web-based information assets without having to invest heavily in backend systems integration. Contradicting my recent post where I said companies must have a good SOA strategy before deploying enterprise mashups, “Dapper for the Enterprise” could get us a long way toward achieving the mashup dream without such an investment.

I’m feeling more optimistic about this whole enterprise mashup thing now.