IBM (News - Alert) on Thursday announced a new technology to secure “mashups,” (also spelled ‘mash-ups’), which are Web applications that can be constructed by non-programmer type business people by linking to and retrieving information from multiple sources, such as Web sites, enterprise databases or e-mails, thus creating a single unified view and providing a functionality “greater than the sum of its parts.” As in the case with all Web-based initiatives, especially far-out Web 2.0 ones, security has been a concern.

 

IBM said that its new technology was codenamed “SMash” (for “secure mashup”) but the term has also been used by IBM to represent the phrase, “simple, many, self-healing.” IBM was led to mashups as an area of interest when it began to tackle “goal-oriented computing” where users simply specify what they want their systems to do and then let some onboard intelligence work out the linkages and processes involved, thus enabling any strategy to be automatically implemented.

 

By applying “reductionism” all strategies and implementations can be “atomized” down to small functional pieces, with each piece understanding how it can link and work with other pieces to serve as a component in a new functional assembly.

 

The best mashup would resemble a biological organism, a sort of shape-shifting chimera—the user would simply specify the kind of application he or she needed, and the components would intelligently figure out among themselves how to assemble themselves in a way that satisfies the need.

 

The ultimate, fantasy mashup would be autonomous, and would figure out the need for a certain application before the user could, and then automatically generate the resulting process or report. It brings about a self-healing (and self-directed) organization. That’s why some IBM researchers keep using terms such as “autonomic computing”, which describes intelligent system activities that occur in the background, behind the scenes, just like such bodily processes as digesting food and maintaining blood pressure.

 

In any case, IBM is donating this new security-oriented SMash technology to the OpenAjax Alliance of vendors, which labors to create standards for interoperable Asynchronous JavaScript and XML technologies. (IBM is a founding member of the OpenAjax Alliance.) SMash’s security scheme enables information from different sources to communicate, but it keeps them separated so that malicious code that may have entered one data source is barred from infecting or interfering with enterprise systems.