Abmash: Mashing Up Legacy Web Applications by Automated Imitation of Human Actions

Many business web-based applications do not offer applications programming interfaces (APIs) to enable other applications to access their data and functions in a programmatic manner. This makes their composition difficult (for instance to synchronize data between two applications). To address this challenge, this paper presents Abmash, an approach to facilitate the integration of such legacy web applications by automatically imitating human interactions with them. By automatically interacting with the graphical user interface (GUI) of web applications, the system supports all forms of integrations including bi-directional interactions and is able to interact with AJAX-based applications. Furthermore, the integration programs are easy to write since they deal with end-user, visual user-interface elements. The integration code is simple enough to be called a "mashup".Comment: Software: Practice and Experience (2013)

From mashups to telco mashups: A survey

Given their increasing popularity and novel requirements and characteristics, telco mashups deserve an analysis that goes beyond what's available for mashups in general. Here, the authors cluster telco services into different types, analyze their features, derive a telco mashup reference architecture, and survey how well existing mashup tools can respond to these mashups' novel needs. © 2012 IEEE

Situational Enterprise Services

The ability to rapidly find potential business partners as well as rapidly set up a collaborative business process is desirable in the face of market turbulence. Collaborative business processes are increasingly dependent on the integration of business information systems. Traditional linking of business processes has a large ad hoc character. Implementing situational enterprise services in an appropriate way will deliver the business more flexibility, adaptability and agility. Service-oriented architectures (SOA) are rapidly becoming the dominant computing paradigm. It is now being embraced by organizations everywhere as the key to business agility. Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX on the other hand provide good user interactions for successful service discovery, selection, adaptation, invocation and service construction. They also balance automatic integration of services and human interactions, disconnecting content from presentation in the delivery of the service. Another Web technology, such as semantic Web, makes automatic service discovery, mediation and composition possible. Integrating SOA, Web 2.0 Technologies and Semantic Web into a service-oriented virtual enterprise connects business processes in a much more horizontal fashion. To be able run these services consistently across the enterprise, an enterprise infrastructure that provides enterprise architecture and security foundation is necessary. The world is constantly changing. So does the business environment. An agile enterprise needs to be able to quickly and cost-effectively change how it does business and who it does business with. Knowing, adapting to diffident situations is an important aspect of today’s business environment. The changes in an operating environment can happen implicitly and explicitly. The changes can be caused by different factors in the application domain. Changes can also happen for the purpose of organizing information in a better way. Changes can be further made according to the users' needs such as incorporating additional functionalities. Handling and managing diffident situations of service-oriented enterprises are important aspects of business environment. In the chapter, we will investigate how to apply new Web technologies to develop, deploy and executing enterprise services

Generic Business Model Types for Enterprise Mashup Intermediaries

The huge demand for situational and ad-hoc applications desired by the mass of business end users led to a new kind of Web applications, well-known as Enterprise Mashups. Users with no or limited programming skills are empowered to leverage in a collaborative manner existing Mashup components by combining and reusing company internal and external resources within minutes to new value added applications. Thereby, Enterprise Mashup environments interact as intermediaries to match the supply of providers and demand of consumers. By following the design science approach, we propose an interaction phase model artefact based on market transaction phases to structure required intermediary features. By means of five case studies, we demonstrate the application of the designed model and identify three generic business model types for Enterprise Mashups intermediaries (directory, broker, and marketplace). So far, intermediaries following a real marketplace business model don’t exist in context of Enterprise Mashups and require further research for this emerging paradigm

Enhancement of the usability of SOA services for novice users

Recently, the automation of service integration has provided a significant advantage in delivering services to novice users. This art of integrating various services is known as Service Composition and its main purpose is to simplify the development process for web applications and facilitates reuse of services. It is one of the paradigms that enables services to end-users (i.e.service provisioning) through the outsourcing of web contents and it requires users to share and reuse services in more collaborative ways. Most service composers are effective at enabling integration of web contents, but they do not enable universal access across different groups of users. This is because, the currently existing content aggregators require complex interactions in order to create web applications (e.g., Web Service Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL)) as a result not all users are able to use such web tools. This trend demands changes in the web tools that end-users use to gain and share information, hence this research uses Mashups as a service composition technique to allow novice users to integrate publicly available Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) services, where there is a minimal active web application development. Mashups being the platforms that integrate disparate web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to create user defined web applications; presents a great opportunity for service provisioning. However, their usability for novice users remains invalidated since Mashup tools are not easy to use they require basic programming skills which makes the process of designing and creating Mashups difficult. This is because Mashup tools access heterogeneous web contents using public web APIs and the process of integrating them become complex since web APIs are tailored by different vendors. Moreover, the design of Mashup editors is unnecessary complex; as a result, users do not know where to start when creating Mashups. This research address the gap between Mashup tools and usability by the designing and implementing a semantically enriched Mashup tool to discover, annotate and compose APIs to improve the utilization of SOA services by novice users. The researchers conducted an analysis of the already existing Mashup tools to identify challenges and weaknesses experienced by novice Mashup users. The findings from the requirement analysis formulated the system usability requirements that informed the design and implementation of the proposed Mashup tool. The proposed architecture addressed three layers: composition, annotation and discovery. The researchers developed a simple Mashup tool referred to as soa-Services Provisioner (SerPro) that allowed novice users to create web application flexibly. Its usability and effectiveness was validated. The proposed Mashup tool enhanced the usability of SOA services, since data analysis and results showed that it was usable to novice users by scoring a System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 72.08. Furthermore, this research discusses the research limitations and future work for further improvements

ToMaTo: A Trustworthy Code Mashup Development Tool

Recent years have seen the emergence of a new programming paradigm for Web applications that emphasizes the reuse of external content, the mashup. Although the mashup paradigm enables the creation of innovative Web applications with emergent features, its openness introduces trust problems. These trust issues are particularly prominent in JavaScript code mashup - a type of mashup that integrated external Javascript libraries to achieve function and software reuse. With JavaScript code mashup, external libraries are usually given full privileges to manipulate data of the mashup application and executing arbitrary code. This imposes considerable risk on the mashup developers and the end users. One major causes for these trust problems is that the mashup developers tend to focus on the functional aspects of the application and implicitly trust the external code libraries to satisfy security, privacy and other non-functional requirements. In this paper, we present ToMaTo, a development tool that combines a novel trust policy language and a static code analysis engine to examine whether the external libraries satisfy the non-functional requirements. ToMaTo gives the mashup developers three essential capabilities for building trustworthy JavaScript code mashup: (1) to specify trust policy, (2) to assess policy adherence, and (3) to handle policy violation. The contributions of the paper are: (1) a description of JavaScript code mashup and its trust issues, and (2) a development tool (ToMaTo) for building trustworthy JavaScript code mashup

Revyu: Linking reviews and ratings into the Web of Data

Revyu is a live, publicly accessible reviewing and rating Web site, designed to be usable by humans whilst transparently generating machine-readable RDF metadata for the Semantic Web, based on user input. The site uses Semantic Web specifications such as RDF and SPARQL, and the latest Linked Data best practices to create a major node in a potentially Web-wide ecosystem of reviews and related data. Throughout the implementation of Revyu design decisions have been made that aim to minimize the burden on users, by maximizing the reuse of external data sources, and allowing less structured human input (in the form of Web 2.0-style tagging) from which stronger semantics can later be derived. Links to external sources such as DBpedia are exploited to create human-oriented mashups at the HTML level, whilst links are also made in RDF to ensure Revyu plays a first class role in the blossoming Web of Data. In this paper we document design decisions made during the implementation of Revyu, discuss the techniques used for linking Revyu data with external sources, and outline how data from the site is being used to infer the trustworthiness of reviewers as sources of information and recommendations

Mashup Ecosystems: Integrating Web Resources on Desktop and Mobile Devices

The Web is increasingly used as an application platform, and recent development of it has introduced software ecosystems where different actors collaborate. This collaboration is international from day one, and it evolves and grows rapidly. In web ecosystems applications are provided as services, and interdependencies between ecosystem parts can vary from very strong and obvious to loose and recondite. Mashups -- web application hybrids that combine resources from different services into an integrated system that has increased value from user perspective -- are exploiting services of the Web and creating ecosystems where end-users, mashup authors, and service providers collaborate. The term "resources" is used here in a broad sense, and it can refer to user's local data, infinite content of the Web, and even executable code. This dissertation presents mashups as a new breed of web applications that are intended for parsing the web content into an easily accessed form on both regular desktop computers as well as on mobile devices. Constantly evolving web technologies and new web services open up unforeseen possibilities for mashup development. However, developing mashups with current methods and tools for existing deployment environments is challenging. First, the Web as an application platform faces numerous shortcomings, second, web application development practices in general are still immature, and third, development of mashups has additional requirements that need to be addressed. In addition, mobility sets even more challenges for mashup authoring. This dissertation describes and addresses numerous issues regarding mashup ecosystems and client-side mashup development. To achieve this, we have implemented technical research artifacts including mashup ecosystems and different kinds of mashup compositions. The artifacts are developed with numerous runtime environments and tools and targeted at different end-user platforms. This has allowed us to evaluate methods, tools, and practises used during the implementation. As result, this dissertation identifies the fundamental challenges of mashup ecosystems and describes how service providers and mashup ecosystem authors can address these challenges in practice. In addition, example implementation of a specialized multimedia mashup ecosystem for mobile devices is described. To address mashup development issues, this dissertation introduces practical guidelines and a reference architecture that can be applied when mashups are created with traditional web development tools. Moreover, environments that can be used on mobile devices to create mashups that have access to both web and local resources are introduced. Finally, a novel approach to web software development -- creating software as a mashup -- is introduced, and a realization of such concept is described