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Yesterday was the first chance I’d had to play around with Yahoo Pipes: wow. The UI just blows me away for a web app, and that’s just the UI; the application itself is also solid. As Dave Brondsema and I wired, transformed, and otherwise massaged data from a variety of applications, I started to wonder how I might be able to use this in my job.

It occurred to me that we were essentially doing enterprise application integration (EAI), an area that has been synonymous with overly complicated and outrageously expensive software. Could RSS be a viable alternative to the setup overhead, language specificity, and clustering complexities of technologies like JMS? Here’s an example of what I’m imagining: when a business adds a new item to its inventory, that item needs to have pricing assigned to it. If item system generates an RSS feed of all new, unpriced items, the pricing system could subscribe to that feed and check it on a regular basis. New items in the feed would be pulled off an assigned a price. Other systems (e.g., inventory management) could subscribe to a feed of the newly priced items from the pricing system, allowing them to know when an item was ready for sale.

Throw in a tool like Yahoo Pipes that 1) would make it easy for developers to control those application integrations and 2) make it possible for advanced business users to create their own mashups of corporate data, and you’ve got some really awesome power for controlling corporate data flow. For that to happen, Yahoo would need to make Pipes available for hosting on a company’s own servers, safely ensconced behind firewalls. While I’d love to see Yahoo open source Pipes, I’d even be content with a commercial package, perhaps something like the Google Search Appliance.

Open issues: error handling and monitoring (how would you “re-queue” an RSS feed item?), transactions and rollback handling… any others I’m forgetting?

written by Kyle