Business Alignment with IT is the major point drawing attention of all business people. Ironically, with so many investments regarding the fulfillment of this project, it is still posing to be a big challenge.

IT and business more or less remain poles apart, no matter how many efforts you are putting in to bring them closer. Mash ups are the new initiatives in this league. They are new kids on the same block targeting to align business goals with IT. They are the technological novels aiming to bring two different campuses together.

Theoretically, mash up is a web oriented application that integrates data from two different sources into a single tool. They are created using a new development platform called Ajax.

They are scaling up on popularity charts aiming to introduce interactivity with users and to pull information from third party. All innovations like SOA or ERP or many others, they are all based on business goals but this new whizkid targets the consumers.

The sites promoting the open source alliances are turning the Web into an open platform and inviting developers or non-developers to work on them and put in their ideas if they have any, based on the same concept.

Google Maps are the most common examples to make the underlying basic to sound more clear and unambiguous. With Google Maps the users can access location data and integrate it with real estate making the result look as if driven from any third party. The content sourced to mash ups is drawn from any party using APIs. The methods other than this include feeds like RSS or screen scraping.

The underlying architecture for mash ups include:

The API/Content Provider: the source from where the data is pulled to mash, for instance, RSS or web services.

The mash up site: this is the site where mash up is being hosted; meaning the new service that has been created by pulling the information from two sources and originally none of the two was offering the same service.

The Client Web Browser: this is the part of architecture where the whole interactivity is brought into the scene. This is the part where application gets a graphical feel and mash ups can be handled using client side web services like Java Script.

The technology carries a novel idea with it but is the baby of those who have never imagined a world without Internet and their all applications need web as an underlying platform. The live examples for mash up sites are: Panoramio, Hiking Outpost, Flash Earth, Diggdot, or HousingMaps.

The mash ups are giving a development platform to non developers but with them security threats can seek a high emergence. This is empowering people with ability to self-service IT. But the question arises, "Are they really the next big things for productivity or are initiatives that can invite destruction?"