Mashups are Groovy!

Social networking is all the rage these days! You need only witness the skyrocketing popularity of applications like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to see that people have a fundamental need to connect and belong to other like minded people. After all – it's human nature, right? Something else is also the rage these days: open application interfaces. Again, you need only look at Google or Twitter, for example, as two different entities that are open to the eyes and innovations of developers the world over for both platforms offer APIs to query and ultimately integrate their applications with what ever a developer can dream up.

Interestingly, because Twitter exposes location information, you can combine both Twitter with Google to create a mashup that allows people to view twitter in light of a particular location. In fact, what we're going to build is a simple application that allows users to view a map of their friends – that is, we'll provide them a geo-view of their network. As such, we'll need to do three things – that is, first we'll implement a map via Google Maps, then we'll tie into Twitter via a Java based 3rd party library and lastly, we'll tie it all together with Groovy via a few Groovlets and a bit of Ajax with jQuery.

About Andrew Glover

Andrew is the Engineering Manager for Netflix's Delivery Engineering Team. He and his team are building the next generation Continuous Delivery platform that is facilitating Netflix's rapid global expansion. Before joining Netflix, he served as the CTO of App47, where he lead the development of a SaaS Mobile Application Management platform. Andrew is also the co-author of Addison Wesley's “Continuous Integration” and he actively blogs about software at thediscoblog.com.

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