Code Glide is a new firm with its development efforts in Buenos Aires, Argentina and major sales offices in San Francisco, London, and Barcelona. They certainly know how to pick great cities. Founded in 2007, they are developing a suite of commercial open source integrated business tools.  I recently spoke with Mauro DeGennaro, VP of Product Development at CodeGlide, who said he spends half his year in Buenos Aires and half in San Francisco.  They have four apps launched and more are in the works.

The first four include: Fusion for mashups, Snap CRM, Rendezvous for collaboration, and their Enterprise Suite that includes the other three.  We focused on Fusion. It allows you to create, customize, share and secure enterprise mashups. There is an intuitive drag-and-drop interface and snap-together components. The visual interface does not require programming. Mauro said it was similar to Yahoo Pipes but for the Enterprise. You can bring together structured, or unstructured data from SOA or Web 2.0-enabled apps, as well as legacy enterprise applications behind your firewall. Here is screen shot of the Mashup Designer.

Fusion’s allows you to create SOAP and RESTful Web services, RSS feeds, AJAX widgets, or export your information to Excel files and other formats. You can embed mashups on Web pages, blogs, wikis and portals. Security is handled with built-in features like granular access levels, user roles, teams, nested permissions and audit trails, CodeGlide Fusion mashups meet all security and enterprise governance requirements. CodeGlide Fusion also protects you from vendor lock-in with an open source code base. Here is a sample screen from a Yahoo Map mashup.

We discussed their Fusion components. Here is the complete set of components that I took from their web site. I found it interesting as it shows some of the possibilities with mashups.

Data Combination Components

• Union: Generates a new item set combining consecutively all items sets passed as inputs.
• Merge: Generates a new item set by performing a direct product (Cartesian product) of the item sets passed as inputs.
• Pairing: Generates a new item set where its i-th item is a tuple composed by the i-th item of each input item set.
• Join: Combines all input items sets using a Merge operation, then filters them using a Filter operation and finally generates the resulting item set using the Transform operation.

Filtering Components

• Filter: Returns all items from the input item set that satisfy the specified filter condition. Supports specifying conditions using basic filters, advanced nested filters, or arbitrary XPath expressions.
• Head: Returns the first n items of the input item set.
• Tail: Returns the last n items of the input item set.
• Drop: Discards the first n items of the input item set and returns the remaining items.
• Unique: Removes duplicates items from the input item set determined by configurable criteria.

Ordering Components

• Sort: Returns the input item set sorted by one or many fields. Supports ascending and descending sort as well as alphabetic and numeric ordering.
• Reverse: Returns the input item set in reverse order.

Item Transformation Components

• Extract: Obtains a sub-item from each item in the input item set.
• Transform: Transforms each item in the input item set. Item fields can be copied from source items or built using XPath expressions.

I asked Mauro about testing mashups since you are integrating multiple data sets. This question had intrigued me. He said it was no problem because you get to see the data flow right away. This allows you to see any bugs immediately since you are not able to go forward. Code Glide is working on filling out their suite of applications. I look forward to seeing the remainder of their offering.