I’s bit held up with other tasks, so was a bit long break in my writing. Now I’ll continue on what I showed in my previous post. Today we’ll see how a Mashup can be used to give powerful reporting feature. I’ll discuss about the charting of data from an enterprise source. Let’s say we’ve a data something like the following table
Here it depicts the total gross and net sales value of the organization for different category of product and services (ERP & SERVICE here) for different quarters of the year. Let’s say the ERP system of this organization exposes and API that gives this data in some XML format. For example check this XML. Something like below
Now we’ve the charting APIs from Google (what they don’t provide man….. J ). It provides a powerful set of APIs with lots of options that can produce different type of charts. Please check the Google Charts for further details on the API. Now we have the different services available – viz Data provider and the Chart creator. It’s now time to Mashup them into a more useful UI. I’ve read the data from the xml using an xml parser and fed the same data to the chart API from Google. What we get is a beautiful graph plotted against our enterprise data.
It’s quite simple with Mashup. Otherwise, we need to run our charting machine which is a overhead in many ways. The above chart depicts the sales in millions (y axis) and against the various quarters (x-axis). The same data can be plotted against a map to depict the geographical distribution of the sales as I showed in my last post. For creating a Mashup there is no limits. It completely depends on the creativity and the requirement of the situation. There are N number of services and more number of service providers available over the web. Hence the theoretical limit of Mashups is infinite. Out of Infinite probabilities possible, lies the base and secret for the interactive and efficient UI which form the basics of Web 2.0.
The complete source code of the above example can be downloaded here. For using this, just unzip the archive into your webserver and set the parameters in the conf.mysql.php and use the qsales_table_def.sql file to create the table. To see this in action check this link. Hope this gives a better idea of what a Mashup can do. Share with me your views on this.
