I'm sad about the announcement that Google is shutting down its Mashup Editor -- one reason being that I had spent a fair amount of effort writing about it in Chapter 11 of  my book.  Oh well.  The Google App Engine is touted as a suitable and more powerful alternative to the Mashup Editor -- but I have to agree with that the comment that the simplicity of the Mashup Editor was a virtue.

In Chapters 9 and 11, I analyze service composition frameworks, tools that make it easier to create mashups, for "design patterns" among mashups. That is, if some tool offers a template, it's likely that there is a design pattern behind that template. If time allows, I'd like to study at the least the following frameworks. openkapow is one such system. I want to look at the ones highlighted in John Musser's recent presentation at Web 2.0 Expo. See Open APIs Talk at Web 2.0 Expo and specifically the quote from Digg floats API, phishing mashups to come:

"The tool space is going to explode, both for developers and nondevelopers," Musser said. Of particular note were data mashup tools such as Yahoo Pipes, RSSBus, and Grazr; scraping tools for making structured data from unstructured data, such as Kapow and Dapper; and visual development tools, including JackBe, Teqlo, Bungee, and IBM's QEDWiki.

I'm already studying Yahoo! Pipes, Kapow, Dapper, and QEDWiki but have yet to look at:

• JackBe.com - Enterprise Web 2.0 Solutions
• Teqlo
• RSSBus
• Grazr
• Bungee Labs

How well do these tools work? We'll see.