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This paper explores trends past, current, and future in the mashup space and surveys the types of tools used to build and distribute mashups. The goal is to develop a set of criteria for the reader to use when evaluating mashup platforms for the development of business applications. Where appropriate, analogies to existing technologies and methodologies are employed. However, the paper's intent is to introduce and clarify the various layers of technology in the mashup space, not to make relative value judgments or to advocate particular vendors' solutions. Our hope is that readers will come away with a framework to help them make informed choices about tools for building mashups.
In 2005, a new wave of web applications started garnering a lot of attention among technology commentators and the press. One displayed housing listings on an interactive map, another showed graphical representations of social networks by using photographs of individuals connected with lines, and others showed real-time locations of taxicabs and recent crimes. What all these applications had in common, besides being web apps, was that they were built very quickly by small teams, often only one person. How was this possible? The difference between these apps and traditional software development was the developers' reliance on extant software and services like Google Maps and Craigslist apartment listings. By reusing these large, powerful services, the developers were able to focus on the creative part of development where they were adding unique value, not reinventing the wheel. The development costs and risks were so low that hundreds of individual programmers began to develop fun and hobbyist applications that until very recently were infeasible to build.
These applications became known as "mashups". The term was inspired by the popular music trend in which hobbyists would remix two songs by "mashing" large segments of them together. "Mashup" struck a chord with people in the technology world, and then it started to appear in the context of business in such terms as "enterprise mashups." It seemed to combine a lot of different big trends that were becoming extremely relevant at the time: the expansion of data available on the public internet and the increasing trends towards structured services to access those data, the shift in corporate IT towards service-orientation, and the explosion of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) apps such as Salesforce.com. People in the technology world started applying the term "mashup platform" or "mashup builder" to all sorts of things from specific web applications to tools designed for non-programmers to build new applications. While definitions and scope may vary, there does seem to be a common thread: people talking about "mashups" are talking about software technologies which make application development radically less expensive, so much so as to change the basic value equation driving the decision to develop custom software applications. Some readers with a background in enterprise IT must be wondering, "what is the difference between mashups and composite applications?"
In our opinion, the short answer is, "very little." Composite app technology was intended to change the application development lifecycle and cost equation in a fashion similar to mashups. However, we do see two noteworthy differences in the approaches:
The developer audience
Composite application development is relegated predominantly to the development of enterprise applications by enterprise IT departments. Mashup applications, on the other hand, were innovated by individual developers during their free time. The corresponding tools and practices have begun to enter the business picture after taking root and being proven in a grassroots fashion. Mashup technologies have focused on speed and efficiency, deploying technologies in a bottom-up fashion rather than designing new systems from the top down. Unencumbered by corporate IT policies and legacy concerns, independent developers used the best, and often easiest, technologies available to get the job done. The growing interest in RESTful design over WS-* services prove the power of their influence.
Deployment and purpose
A composite application is usually something built and deployed inside an organization. An example composite application might link supply-chain management (SCM) software to customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Originally, the word "mashup" was strictly used to describe web applications that were a hybrid of two or more consumer web services (e.g. Housingmaps. com = Google Maps + Craigslist).
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