Smash – IBM's secure mashup tool

IBM have released a newly developed mashup tool.

Smash is designed to create mashups securely, which IBM hope will make mashups available to the wider enterprise market by sorting out security issues, one of their chief problems.

Mashups enable the creation of customised applications by users who do not have extensive technical coding knowledge.

Rod Smith, IBM fellow and vice president, explained the idea behind Smash. ‘Web 2.0 is fundamentally about empowering people, and has created a societal shift in the way we organise, access and use information,’ he said.

‘Security concerns cannot be a complete inhibitor or clients lose out on the immense benefit mashups bring.’

‘You would not buy a car and then decide later to have the seatbelts or airbags installed, so as an industry we have learned how to build security into business operations from the ground up instead of tacking it on afterwards.’

Like most mashup applications, Smash works by pulling specific pieces of code and data from a variety of sources, bringing them together in a single application. The difference is that it keeps each of the components being used in the mashup separate from each other, whilst still allowing them to ‘talk’. This prevents any potentially malicious codes getting from one component to another.

Smash will be unveiled next month at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing.

It will also be useable by companies other than IBM, who plan to include it in OpenAjax, an open source development group aimed at advancing the use of Ajax for web-based applications