Proposing a context-aware enterprise mashup readiness assessment framework

Web mashups have received a lot of attention recently as more enterprises are engaged in enterprise 2.0 initiatives. So far, there is insufficient research on the adoption and diffusion of Web mashups in an enterprise context. In this paper, we discussed the benefits and issues associated with enterprise mashups. We proposed a context-aware enterprise mashup readiness assessment framework to help enterprise managers and decision makers determine their needs and readiness for enterprise mashups. A case study was conducted to verify the usefulness of the proposed framework. The results show that our work can be used to guide enterprises with their decision making for the adoption of enterprise mashups and thus contribute to the development of a rigorous strategy for enterprise mashup adoption, development and diffusion.     

An environment for End-User Development of Web mashups

End-User Development aims to find novel ways that are suitable and intuitive for end users to create their own applications. We present a graphical environment in which users create new mashups by directly selecting interaction elements, content and functionalities from existing Web applications without requiring the intervention of expert developers. Then, users just need to exploit a copy–paste metaphor to indicate how to compose the selected interactive content and functionalities in the new mashup. The environment is enabled by a Web-based platform accessible from any browser, and is suitable for users without particular programming skills. We describe the architecture of our platform and how it works, including its intelligent support, show example applications, and report the results of first user studies.     

An Online Platform for Web APIs and Service Mashups

On the newly programmable Web, mashups are flourishing. Designers create mashups by combining components of existing Web sites and applications. Although rapid mashup proliferation offers many opportunities, a lack of standarization and compatibility offers considerable challenges. IBM Sharable Code is an online service platform for developing and sharing situational Web 2.0 applications and mashups. The platform is based on an innovative domain-specific language that streamlines and standardizes the development and deployment of applications consuming and exposing Web APIs. Parts of the DSL and the resulting applications and mashups can be shared and reused by members of the IBM Sharable Code community. In this article, the authors offer an overview of the platform's architecture and the DSL language at its core.     

End-User Development of Mashups with NaturalMash

Context: The emergence of the long-tail in the market of software applications is shifting the role of end-users from mere consumers to becoming developers of applications addressing their unique, personal, and transient needs. On the Web, a popular form of such applications is called mashup, built out of the lightweight composition of Web APIs (reusable software components delivered as a service through the Web). To enable end-users to build mashups, there is a key problem that must be overcome: End-users lack programming knowledge as well as the interest to learn how to master the complex set of Web technologies required to develop mashups. End-User Development (EUD) is an emerging research field dealing with this type of problems. Its main goal is to design tools and techniques facilitating the development of software applications by non-programmers.Objective: The paper describes the design and evaluation of NaturalMash, an innovative EUD tool for mashups (a mashup tool). NaturalMash aims at enabling non-professional users without any knowledge of programming languages and skills to create feature-rich, interactive, and useful mashups.Methods: The design of NaturalMash adopts a formative evaluation approach, and has completed three design and evaluation iterations. The formative evaluations utilize usability testing, think aloud protocol, questionnaires, observation, and unstructured interviews. Additionally, we compare the expressive power of naturalmash with the state-of-the-art mashup tools.Results: The results from the formative evaluations helped us identify important usability problems. From an assessment point of view, the results were promising and sggested that the proposed tool has a short and gentle learning curve in a way that even non-programmers are able to rapidly build useful mashups. Also, the comparative evaluation results showed that NaturalMash offers a competitive level of expressive power compared with existing mashup tools targeting non-programmers.Conclusion: As the evaluation results indicate, NaturalMash provides a high level of expressive power while it is still highly usable by non-programmers. These suggest that we have successfully achieved the objective of the proposed tool, distinguishing it from existing mashup tools that are either too limited or highly specialized for non-professional users.     

A combinatory framework of Web 2.0 mashup tools,OWL-S and UDDI

The increasing number of Web 2.0 applications, such as wikis or social networking sites, indicates a movement to large-scale collaborative and social Web activities. Users can share information, add value to Web applications by using them or aggregate data from different sources creating Web applications (mashups) using specialized tools (mashup tools). However, Web 2.0 is not a new technology, but it rather embraces a new philosophy, treating the Internet as a platform. Several issues related to the Semantic Web vision, such as interoperability or machine understandable data semantics, are not tackled by Web 2.0. In this paper, we present our effort to combine semantic Web services (SWS) discovery frameworks, UDDI repositories and existing mashup tools in order to enhance the procedure of developing mashups with semantic mashup discovery capabilities. Towards this end, we introduce a social-oriented extension of OWL-S advertisements, their mapping algorithm on UDDI repositories and a semantic mashup discovery algorithm. Finally, we elaborate on the way our framework has been realized using the Yahoo Pipes mashup tool.     

Knowledge Discovery in Services

Service mashups can be useful in understanding Web-scale workflows. Although creating a service mashup shares similar challenges with data integration, a more exciting aspect of this area is the ability to predict which services are viable candidates for a mashup. Such "service mashup recommendations" can enable knowledge discovery, an approach the author calls knowledge discovery in services (KDS).     

A systematic review of tools,languages, and methodologies for mashup development

Web 2.0 has become a powerful means of transmitting information in a number of fields, such as communication, e‐commerce, and entertainment. Nowadays, companies and organizations transmit specific information through different mechanisms, such as Web feeds and Web services. These data sources enable third parties to incorporate data from service providers into their own applications. On the basis of this understanding, mashups have emerged as a new approach to develop applications and which combine data and resources from heterogeneous sources—such as internal data sources, Web feeds, screen scraping, and Web services—with the aim of solving specific needs. Mashup development involves activities such as accessing heterogeneous sources, combining data from different data sources, and building graphical interfaces. These activities restrict the development of these kinds of applications only to experienced computer users. Today, a number of tools and programming languages are used to help carry out some of the aforementioned activities. These tools and programming languages have features enabling the integration of different technologies in order to solve problems such as data management from different data sources and content publication. If this is taken into account, there is a growing need to learn about the features, advantages, and disadvantages of these tools and programming languages in order to select the tool or language that best fits a specific need and a specific level of knowledge and experience in terms of software development. This paper presents a systematic review and analysis of the tools, programming languages, and software development methodologies involved in mashup development in order to learn more about the features and services provided by mashups. Furthermore, this research also explains the qualitative and quantitative evaluation used for the mashup development tools. The evaluation was performed in order to measure not only the usability of these tools but also the support that they provide for standardized features of Web development that they provide. Finally, new trends in the development of mashups are discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Data-driven synthesis of multiple recommendation patterns to create situational Web mashups

As a typical situational application,Web mashup reflects and accommodates some key features of Internetware paradigm.Mashup provides a development fashion that integrates data,computation and UI elements from multiple resources into a single Web application,and promises the quick rollout of creating potential new functionalities opportunistically.This paper focuses on the problem of recommending useful suggestions for developing data-driven mashups by synthesis of multiple patterns.We present a rapid and intuitive system called iMashupAdvisor,for aiding mashup development based on a novel automated suggestion mechanism.The key observation guiding the development of iMashupAdvisor is that mashups developed by different users might share some common patterns,for instance,selecting similar mashup components for similar goals,and gluing them in a similar manner.Such patterns could reside in multiple sources,e.g.,the data dependency between mashup components,the interaction between users and mashup components,or the collective intelligence from existing applications created and maintained by programmers,etc.iMashupAdvisor leverages the synthesis of these patterns to recommend useful suggestions for a partial mashup,such as the missing components,connections between them,or potentially relevant options,to assist mashup completion.This paper presents the data model and ranking metrics of the synthesis process,and introduces efficient algorithms for the retrieval of recommendations.We also experimentally demonstrate the efficiency of our approach for benefiting the proposed rapid mashup development.     

Understanding Mashup Development

Web mashups are Web applications developed using contents and services available online. Despite rapidly increasing interest in mashups over the past two years, comprehensive development tools and frameworks are lacking, and in most cases mashing up a new application implies a significant manual programming effort. This article overviews current tools, frameworks, and trends that aim to facilitate mashup development. The authors use a set of characteristic dimensions to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of some representative approaches.     

Visual modeling for Web 2.0 applications using model driven architecture approach

Mashup is now a major Web 2.0 technology because, rather than simply aggregating Web content, it combines various Web resources from other websites. Considering Web 2.0 mashups from a software engineering perspective, a visual modeling approach is crucial. Current Web 2.0 developments, however, do not support a conceptual modelling for Web 2.0 applications. This leads to inefficient development processes and a low potential for reuse. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose modeling language that may be used in widely varying application domains. However, UML often lacks elements for modeling and representing concrete concepts of specific domains such as Web 2.0 mashup modeling. To address these shortcomings, this study proposes Web2.0MUML, a Model Driven Architecture (MDA) approach and UML profile for modeling Web 2.0 mashups. The Web2.0MUML profile extends UML by using a profile mechanism for Web 2.0 mashup modeling that presents the relevant structural properties of Web 2.0 at the conceptual level.     

A formal framework for service mashups with dynamic service selection

The service mashup programming paradigm is a blooming faction of service oriented Architecture for developing web applications. A mashup application constructs its functionality by combining data, presentation and functionalities obtained from online services published by service providers such as Google and Amazon. This paradigm significantly facilitates the implementation of application and reduces the workload. But it also makes the application rely on the availability and qualities of the online services which beyond its control in which case the robustness of the system requires more concern. This paper proposes a formal model to specify and analyze the behavior and robustness of service mashups under a certain environment where some services may become unavailable. The specification contains both system specification and environment situation. Refinement theory are employed to specify the correctness of dynamic service selection. The framework realizes the service selection by allowing virtual service requests to be handled by any online service having consistent interface and refined functionality. The framework provides a clear definition of the robustness of mashup systems and proposes several rules as well as approaches to preserve the robustness during the development and maintenance of the system.     

基于REST架构风格的物联网服务平台研发

随着传感网、无线通信、嵌入式系统等技术的发展,推动了物联网技术在诸如仓储物流、智能家庭等领域的应用。但是,现有系统一般都是独立开发,系统间相对较为孤立,存在着系统耦合性强,设备异构等弊端,使得新应用的创建需要复杂的集成工作。提出了一个基于REST架构风格的物联网服务平台,将传感节点等嵌入式设备和感知数据看作资源,使异构系统模块采用REST架构方式组建新型应用,同时设计了物联网服务平台的系统原型,,并给出具体的实现技术和系统验证。     

iMashup: a mashup-based framework for service composition

The Web has undergone a tremendous change from a primarily publication platform towards a participatory and"programmable"platform,where a large number of heterogeneous Web-delivered services(including SOAP and RESTful Web services,RSS and Atom feeds)are emerging.It results in the creation of Web mashup applications with rich user experiences.However,the integration of Web-delivered services is still a challenging issue.It not only requires the developers’tedious eforts in understanding and coordinating heterogeneous service types,but also results in the time-consuming development of user interfaces.In this paper,we propose the iMashup composition framework to facilitate mashup development and deployment.We provide a unified mashup component model for the common representation of heterogeneous Web-delivered service interfaces.The component model specifies necessary properties and behaviors at both business and user interface level.We associate the component model with semantically meaningful tags,so that mashup developers can fast understand the service capabilities.The mashup developers can search and put the proper mashup components into the Web browser based composition environment,and connect them by data flows based on the tag-based semantics.Such an integration manner might prevent some low-level programming eforts and improve the composition efciency.A series of experimental study are conducted to evaluate our framework.     

Edge-cloud-enabled matrix factorization for diversified APIs recommendation in mashup creation

World Wide Web - A growing number of web APIs published on the Internet allows mashup developers to discover appropriate web APIs for polishing mashups. Developers often have to manually pick and...     

面向服务的水泥企业信息系统集成架构

为满足水泥企业流程重组与业务协同对企业信息系统的要求,在充分考虑水泥企业的信息化现状的基础上,综合利用混合云的优势,以面向服务的方法构建了水泥企业信息系统应用集成架构,设计了一种针对大型水泥企业的服务划分算法,以移动服务和设备诊断检测服务为例详细阐述了服务实现的过程.以该应用集成架构为基础构建了某水泥企业应用集成平台,充分利用了云端资源及企业内部信息资源,实现了该水泥企业信息系统的应用集成、共享及远程访问,满足了该企业满足科学管理、流程优化、协同业务等信息化需求.     

基于数据流程变换的Mashup性能优化方法

Mashup是一种流行的web2.0应用,由开发者将互联网上多个web数据源的数据进行聚合构建而成.大多数mashup工具支持通过可视化的数据流程设计来开发mashup,但是缺少编程经验的终端用户设计的数据流程可能执行效率很低,当处理较大规模数据时mashup的响应时间会大幅增加.本文研究如何通过数据处理操作的合并拆分、次序交换、并行化等技术实现mashup的数据流程优化,提高mashup的性能及可扩展性.本文提出一种新的mashup性能优化方法,对多样化的mashup组件标注其操作语义特征属性及代价模型,定义适用于mashup的流程变换规则,针对用户设计的rnashup数据流程生成所有与其语义等价的流程,并提出算法建立流程之间的代价偏序关系图从而快速选择执行代价最小的流程.文中实现了一个mashup工具,实验表明该方法可以有效提高终端用户设计的mashup的执行效率.     

Biomashups: the new world of exploratory bioinformatics?

Bioinformatics is dominated by online databases and sophisticated web‐accessible tools. As such, it is ideally placed to benefit from the rapid, purpose specific combination of services achievable via web mashups. The recent introduction of a number of sophisticated frameworks has greatly simplified the mashup creation process, making them accessible to scientists with limited programming expertise. In this paper we investigate the feasibility of mashups as a new approach to bioinformatic experimentation, focusing on an exploratory niche between interactive web usage and robust workflows, and attempting to identify the range of computations for which mashups may be employed. While we treat each of the major frameworks, we illustrate the ideas with a series of examples developed under the Popfly framework ^‡ . Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

移动终端应用的个性化混搭方法

随着移动互联网的发展,Mashup混搭技术逐渐延伸到移动终端领域。然而目前的移动端Mashup研究主要关注于如何调用后台Web API,却没有将移动端数量庞大的移动应用作为主要的混搭对象进行研究。论文目标是将移动应用、Android框架层API、Web API等各种服务统一视为混搭的基本组件,研究移动端的应用混搭与整合机制,实现APP间的通信,控制APP的执行顺序及相互间的交互与协作,从而满足用户个性化需求。为了消除异构服务间的差异性,提取服务的功能信息构造抽象服务层,封装和屏蔽异构服务调用方式以及输入输出数据类型的差异。定义了描述移动终端应用间混搭的描述型语言,移动终端用户可以DIY式创建满足个性化需求的移动终端Mashup方案。通过一个具体案例展示和验证了方法的有效性。     

齿轮企业基于面向服务架构的应用集成框架与实现*

针对齿轮企业分布式异构应用系统的信息集成与数据共享问题,结合齿轮企业数字化和信息化的发展方向,深入分析了齿轮企业应用系统的集成运作模式;利用面向服务架构和Web服务技术,构建了齿轮企业应用集成框架,分析了集成框架的通信过程,在.NET环境下实现了应用集成框架的软件架构,并用准双曲面齿轮网络化制造的具体应用实例,来说明和验证了基于Web服务的齿轮应用集成框架的实用性。准双曲面齿轮网络化制造的成功应用,说明该应用集成框架是有效可行的,能够很好地满足齿轮企业信息集成与数据共享的需要。