Today's Web is nothing like a database, but it has potential. As it becomes more and more structured, a variety of opportunities arise. Many companies are working on causing a major shift in the way the Web works, from Yahoo!'s SearchMonkey to Dapper, making it ever more like a database. Dapper Founders Jon Aizen and Eran Shir are coming back this summer to India's biggest summit for the developer ecosystem - Great Indian Developer Summit to explore and disseminate the possibilities that arise from structured access to the Web - both things that have been done and things that are to come. They will, for example, discuss vertical search engines, dynamic advertising solutions, and information worker tools, and potential new uses of web data as well. Jon and Eran will also be addressing a novel concept: building an application by gluing together services and functionality that exist on the web as well as conducting a hands-on workshop on synthesizing data from the Web.

Jon and Eran will also be addressing a novel concept: building an application by gluing together services and functionality that exist on the web. Imagine MS Word with a built-in translation function from Google's Translate service, storage of files on Amazon's S3, spell checking and thesaurus from Miriam Webster online, and image conversion using online tools. In this fashion, they will demonstrate how an entire application can be built using existing code. This is a true and deep extension of the mashup concept, but applied at a more application-feature level.

Dapper founders will also delve into the brass tacks on creating mashups by showing attendees hands-on how to build a working application that brings content in from various sources on the web. Topics will include XML parsing, JSON, RSS, YQL, caching, and best practices for obtaining data. Various platforms and tools will be shown, including Dapper and Yahoo! Pipes.