Mashups: The new breed of Web Applications

1
Mashups The new breed of Web Applications

• Umut Orhan

2
Outline

• The term Mashup
• Mashups Genres
• Technologies behind Mashups
• Emerging Technical and Social Challenges

3
History - Information Technology Spend had been
growing nicely
1964 S/360 debuts
1994 Netscape Navigator
2000 Dot-com collapse
1971 First Intel Micro
1981 IBM PC
4
Dot.com Collapse - Is it the end?
Just the beginning of a golden age
Innovation
Deployment
The Industrial Revolution
Irruption
Frenzy
Synergy
Maturity
Panic 1797
Age of Steam and Railways

• Formation of Mfg. industry
• Repeal of Corn Laws opening trade

1
1771
1829
Age of Steel, Electricity and Heavy Engineering
Panic 1847
2

• Standards on gauge, time
• Catalog sales companies
• Economies of scale

1829
1873
Depression 1893
Age of Oil, Automobiles and Mass Production
3

• Separation of savings, investment banks
• FDIC, SEC

1920
1875
Age of Information and Telecommunications
4

• Build-out of Interstate highways
• IMF, World Bank, BIS

1974
Crash 1929
1908
Dot.com Collapse
5
Current period of Institutional Adjustment
1971
Source Technological Revolutions and Financial
Capital, Carlota Perez, 2002
5
Mashups are

• an exciting genre of interactive Web
  applications that
• Retrieve content from external data sources
• Create entirely new and innovative services
• Hallmark of the Web 2.0
• Run-time integration

6
The term Mashup

• Borrowed from the pop music scene
• Vocal and instrumental sounds from different
  source tracks are mixed to form a new mashup
  song
• An unusual or innovative composition of content
  (often from unrelated data sources)
• Made for human (rather than computerized)
  consumption

7
Current Status
From programmableweb.com on 1/12/2006
8
What might a Mashup look like?

• The ChicagoCrime.org Web site
• A mapping mashup
• One of the first popular mashups
• Mashes crime data from the Chicago Police
  Departments online database with cartography
  from Google Maps
• The concept and the presentation are simple and
  the composition of crime and map data is visually
  powerful

9
Outline

• The term Mashup
• Mashups Genres
• Technologies behind Mashups
• Emerging Technical and Social Challenges

10
Mashups

• A Mashup web site is characterized by the way in
  which it spreads roots across the Web
• Building upon the content and functionality
  retrieved from external data source
• Mostly the data source lay outside of the
  organizational boundaries

11
Mashup Genres

• Mapping mashups
• Video and photo mashups
• Search and Shopping mashups
• News mashups

12
Mapping Mashups

• Locational information presented graphically
  using maps in a specified context
• Google Maps API opened the floodgates mash all
  sort of data from nuclear disasters to Bostons
  CowParade cows onto maps
• Other APIs
• Microsoft (Virtual Earth)
• Yahoo (Yahoo Maps)
• AOL (MapQuest)

13
Video and Photo Mashups

• The emergence of photo/video hosting and social
  networking sites such as Flickr with APIs and
  YouTube has led to a variety of interesting
  mashups.
• Metadata associated with the hosted images and
  videos
• Who took the picture
• What it is a picture of
• Where and when it was taken
• So on

14
Search and Shopping Mashups

• Exist long before the term Mashup was coined
• Combinations of B2B technologies or
  screen-scraping to aggregate comparative price
  data
• eBay and Amazon have released APIs for
  programmatically accessing their content

15
News Mashups

• News sources such as BBC and Reuters have used
  syndication technologies like RSS and Atom since
  2002.
• Personalized newspaper by Syndication feed
  mashups
• Doggdot.us, combines feeds from the
  techie-oriented news sources Digg.com,
  Slashdot.org and Del.icio.us

16
Outline

• The term Mashup
• Mashups Genres
• Technologies behind Mashups
• Emerging Technical and Social Challenges

17
The architecture

• A mashup architecture comprimes of 3 logically
  and physically disjoint components
• API/Content Provider
• Mashup Site
• Clients Web Browser

18
API/Content Exposition

• Web Protocols
• REST Services
• SOAP Web Services
• RSS/Atom
• Screen Scraping

19
Mashup Site

• Mashup is hosted by a web site
• Mashup logic resides in this site
• Execution is distributed over the web
• The Mashup Site can be implemented and deployed
  similarly to traditional Web application

20
Client-Side Processing

• Mashed content can be generated directly within
  the clients browser through client-side
  scripting (JavaScript) or applets.
• Rich Internet Applications
• Less overhead on behalf of the mashup server
• Data can be retrieved directly from the content
  provider
• More seamless user-experience
• Pages can request updates for portions of their
  content without having to refresh the entire page
• Clients Web Browser is where the application is
  rendered graphically and where the user
  interaction takes place

21
AJAX

• Asynchronous JavaScript and XML
• Web application model rather than a specific
  technology
• Comprises
• XHTML, CSS and XSL for presentation
• DOM API exposed by API for dynamic display and
  interaction
• Asynchronous data exchange, XML or JSON data
• JavaScript
• Aims to create a smooth, cohesive Web experience
  with reducing server-side overloads

22
Web Protocols

• As part of the SOA paradigm, these protocols are
  platform neutral to interact with any remote
  services
• Exchanging XML based messages in general
• Messages are typically conveyed over standard
  transports such as HTTP and SMTP

23
Web Protocols SOAP

• Simple Object Access Protocol
• Fundamental technology behind Web Services
• SOAP APIs for Web Services described by WSDL
  documents
• What operations a service expose
• The format for the messages that it accepts
  (using XML Schema)
• How to address the service

24
Web Protocols REST

• Representational State Transfer
• Similar to document-literal style of SOAP
• Identification of resources by URIs
• Supports less operations (POST, GET, PUT, DELETE)

25
Screen Scraping

• Scraping is the process of using software tools
  to parse and analyze content that was originally
  written for human consumption in order to extract
  semantic data structures representative of that
  information that can be used and manipulated
  programmatically.

26
Semantic Web and RDF

• To create web infrastructure that augments data
  with metadata to give it meaning for automation,
  integration, reasoning and re-use
• Resource Description Framework (RDF) provides
  methodologies to establish syntactic structures
  that describe data
• RDF allows creation of hierarchical structures of
  knowledge that can be searched and formally
  reasoned about, ontologies

27
Semantic Web and RDF
lives in
lives in
eats?
eats
animalType Carnivore
animalType
Reasoner
animalType
animalType Carnivore
eats?
lives in
lives in
eats
28
RSS and ATOM

• XML-based syndication formats
• Syndication implies that a Web site that wants to
  distribute content creates an RSS or ATOM
  document and registers the document with an RSS
  publisher.
• RSS/ATOM-enabled client can check the publishers
  feed for new content and react to it in an
  appropriate manner.
• Syndication technologies are useful for mashups
  that aggregate event-based or update-driven
  content

29
Outline

• The term Mashup
• Mashups Genres
• Technologies behind Mashups
• Emerging Technical and Social Challenges

30
Data Integration Challenges

• According to surveys number one enterprise IT
  concern today is data integration within the
  enterprise virtual organization
• Virtual Organization a composition of federated
  business units, each contained within its own
  administrative domain
• Mashup developers are faced with challenges of
  deriving shared semantic meaning between
  heterogeneous data sets.
• Mashup developers challenges are similar to
  integration challenges faced by enterprise IT.
• Translator/Mapper systems between different data
  models must be designed.

31
Data Pollution

• Many mashups solicit public user input
• it can be quite powerful because it enables open
  contribution and best-of-breed data evolution
• it can be subject to inconsistent, incorrect or
  intentionally misleading data entry

32
Social Challenges

• Protection of intellectual property and consumer
  privacy versus fair-use and the free flow of
  information

33
In general

• Publishing and Discovering External Data Services
  other than SOAP-based Web Services
• Semantically annotation of data services
• Security leaks (e.g. openness to injection
  attacks)

34
In general

• Client-side processing is not suitable for
  handling complex queries such as Show me the
  average purchase price for real estate bought by
  actors who have co-starred in movies with Brad
  Pitt
• Interoperability among different external data
  providers
• Standard formats for persistent data and
  exchanged messages

35
Thank you for your attention