Backbase Portal

Aggregation

Backbase Portal uses it's mashup engine for aggregation. The Mashup Engine is a set of portal services available to developers to assist in the creation of widgets that bring together content and functionality from multiple web applications and services.

Because of the increasing dominance of web 2.0 and service oriented architectures - where applications are actually composites of multiple applications and data sources - the Mashup Engine provides essential services needed to bring these together in a single widget.

The Mashup Engine consists of 3 essential services:

  • Web Proxy - A proxy used for requesting web resources from other domains and for directing the handling of web requests.
  • Transformation Engine - A flexible 2-way transformation engine for transforming web requests, responses, and content into a format that can be handled by both your gadgets and the web services they call.
  • Caching Engine - A cache used to reduce load on the web services used by your gadgets, and for speeding up the processing of transformation requests by the server.

Web Proxy

The integrated web proxy in the Mashup Engine has two important functions: 1) Proxy requests from widgets for resources that are located in a separate domain (to overcome the JavaScript Same Origin Policy), and 2) Enable the transformation and caching engine functionality to be targeted with a URL for use in a widget.

Transformation Engine

The transformation engine is used to transform requests and responses between your widgets and web services. This dynamic and flexible functionality enables you to create widgets using a single and simple programming method (REST requests + HTML or JSON responses), while making use of back-end services that use different protocols or data formats. (E.g. SOAP, various XML data formats, etc.)

The transformation engine saves you time and reduces complexity when developing widgets. Because you do not have to handle data formatting or transformation in the browser, you can focus on user interaction and experience. Additionally, because the transformation engine can be extended to handle any custom protocols or data formats your widgets can integrate with just about any existing service regardless of how data is served.

Caching Engine

The caching engine is tied directly into the web proxy and transformation engine. Because of this frequently requested back-end services or transformation processes can be cached and reused. For instance if you were to frequently request an RSS news feed and transform it into a list of news items in a widget, you could use the caching engine to cache not only the request to your RSS feed, but also the output of the RSS transformation from XML to HTML.