Chris Collins on Software

ZDNet’s Dion Hinchcliffe asserts that mashups represent “The Next Major Software Development Model”. I’m not sure I agree that they represent a software development model.

While I agree that they are popular, I think they fall into two categories. I guess I’ll call them ‘data aggregation’ and ‘data representation’.

The ‘data aggregation’ category represents those mashups made by users who, rather than visit ten news sites to see the headlines, aggregate the feeds from those sites into one page.

The second sort of mashup is more interesting. For example a manager may request a report of yearly sales, getting the result in a spreadsheet. While this represents the data requested, it’s in a rather dry and unengaging format. What if the sales results could be overlaid on a map, so that zooming into the map showed the sales results by country, region, city, store, etc. Suddenly you have a mashup which adds interaction and value to the data you’re representing.

If we can learn anything from mashups is that the current state of software user interfaces isn’t meeting the needs of users. The best user interfaces are those which represent data in a meaningful and increasingly interactive way to the user. Perhaps soon we’ll see the death of the grid control for tables, the list box and the combo, in favour of these more interesting interfaces.

So with regard to the new software development model, I don’t thing mashups are going to replace good software engineering, though they may force software developers to think outside the dialog.