Mashup Central

Serena.com needed a location within its Serena Business Mashup section where return customers could download and deploy pre-built business processes into their Serena Business Mashup platforms.

Goals: Build a Mashup Central that can read the pre-built mashup data from the application programming interface and then communicate with the deployment module.

Solutions: The initial challenge was to integrate the product’s API with Serena.com’s static HTML pages. I accomplished this using JavaScript, which reads from a REST API to display the products. For the deployment, I used iframes and query string parameters disguised as a modal dialogue.

I collaborated with the client’s development team to create the visual presentation of the mashups. We decided against branding each mashup with a logo and opted instead to present each one using a flowchart to show its processes. We felt this would both prevent confusion and help the user understand what each mashup does. For future versions of Mashup Central, we planned to allow the user to zoom in and out on the flowchart images in order to better understand each pre-built business process.