Some weeks ago I build my first mash up. A mash up is a site which takes existing data and services from websites and uses them in a new way. I implemented two things. First I built a mobile view of the RSS feed of the SAP Developer Network which can be found here. Second I implemented a small search engine for the SAP Developer Network which can be found here. Again, it is optimized for mobile devices. The idea for both sites came from Matt Harding whom I met at the SAP Community Day in Melbourne.

I learned two things by building these sites. First, Ruby on Rails is still an incredible framework for building data driven websites even if you use web services instead of a database backend. I was able to build both sites in a day. In the end testing and releasing them took way more time. Second, Yahoo's REST search API is highly recommendable. It is interesting to see that Yahoo basically gives their search away for free and Google does not even have such a product anymore (they stopped offering their SOAP based search API). Competition is a great thing to have.

It was also interesting to design an interface especially for mobile devices. The constraints imposed by the screen sizes can be quite refreshing.

I wrote two articles about the site on SDN, too. You can find them here and here.