A Web Application Mashup Approach for eLearning

2009

ABSTRACT Recently, Web 2.0 has brought a storm on web application development. In particular, mashups have greatly enhanced user creativity across the web, allowing end-users to rapidly combine information from diverse sources, and integrate them into “new” goal-oriented applications. In the meantime, widgets (also built with Web 2.0 technology) have also gained a lot of momentum.

End-user Programming for the web is currently of interest because Web 2.0 technologies have resulted in a vast array of tools available for mashup making. This paper presents a Systematic Literature Review of EUP for web mashups. Its objective is to outline a comprehensive review and synthesis of the literature related to EUP for web mashups. A Systematic Literature Review was performed of peer reviewed published studies that focused on research in EUP for Web mashups. A review was conducted on 21 relevant articles, mostly recent (published between January 1 st 2000 and December 31 st 2012) and published in English. Five EUP approaches for web mashups were identified from the studies; browsing, programming by demonstration or example, spreadsheet, widget, data-flow and block-based approach. Other researches regarding EUP for web mashups were also identified, such as ubiquitous platform mashups, users' support functions, data extraction techniques, and process-oriented mashups.

2007

There is an increasing tendency for Web applications to open their data silos and make them available through APIs and RSS-based mechanisms. This permits third parties to tap on those resources, combining them in innovative ways to conform the so-called mashup applications. So far, most of the approaches strive to facilitate the user to create bright new mashup applications which are regarded as stand-alone applications. However, the fact that these applications are data driven suggests that the mashup data is frequently used to achieve higher-order goals. Frequently, you are gathering data not just for the sake of the data itself but to help taking some decisions. Some of these decisions are conducted through Web applications. In this scenario, it would be most convenient to post the mashup data by the application where the decision is taken. To this end, the term "mashup personalization" is coined to describe the approach of using mashup techniques for the end user to enrich the content of existing Web applications. A proof-of-concept framework is introduced, MARGMASH, whose operation is illustrated through a running example.

Web Engineering, 2011

Web mashups are a new generation of applications based on the "composition" of ready-to-use services. In different contexts, ranging from the consumer Web to Enterprise systems, the potential of this new technology is to make users evolve from passive receivers of applications to actors actively involved in the "creation of innovation". Enabling end users to self-define applications that satisfy their situational needs is emerging as an important new requirement. In this paper, we address the current lack of lightweight development processes and environments and discuss models, methods, and technologies that can make mashups a technology for end user development.

Mashup Programming is one of the latest trends in web application development. However, different sources still regard that mashup technology is in its infancy despite the mushroom growth of mashup-based applications and technologies. This calls for an in depth analysis of the support available to end users for mashup development. In this paper, we propose a multi-dimensional framework to evaluate existing mashup tools and platforms. The main idea behind this evaluation is to study the state of the art of mashup development from the end-user perspective and critically evaluate the efforts in this regard against a set of criteria to identify the research directions in this field. The idea of evaluation of mashup tools has been tackled through different approaches in past, however, in this research we attempt to synthesize additional concepts regarding mashup development and analyse this area against previously ignored factors, such as support for capturing users' requirements and users' goals. This study also includes platforms that have not yet been covered by previous evaluation studies. The framework presented in this study can be used as a guideline to inform future design of mashup development environments for both academic and industrial research. The results of the study reinforce the need of a more user-oriented approach to deal with the inherent issues of end-user mashup programming. The study concludes with the proposal of use of goals as a guiding mechanism to derive the mashup applications.

Software mashups that combine content from multiple web sites to an integrated experience are a popular trend. However, methods, tools and architectures for creating mashups are still rather undeveloped, and there is little engineering support behind them. In this paper the authors present guidelines that can serve as a helpful starting point for the design of new mashups. Guidelines focus mainly on mashup creation methods. Furthermore, they describe a reference architecture for client-side mashup development. In addition, the authors provide insight into mashup development based on their practical experiences in implementing various sample client-side mashup applications and tools for creating them. The long term goal of the authors' work is to facilitate the development of compelling, robust and maintainable mashup applications, and more generally ease the transition towards web-based software development.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF NEXT-GENERATION COMPUTING, 2012

The recent emergence of mashup tools has refueled research on end-user development, ie, on enabling end-userswithout programming skills to compose own applications. Yet, similar to what happened with analogous promisesin web service composition and business process management, research has mostly focused on technology and, asa consequence, has failed its objective. Plain technology (eg, SOAP/WSDL web services) or simple modelinglanguages (eg, Yahoo! Pipes) don't ...

Proceedings of 5th …, 2009

A new kind of Web-based application, known as Enterprise Mashups, has been gaining momentum in the last years: Business users with no or limited programming skills are empowered to leverage in a collaborative manner existing Mashup components and to combine and reuse existing Web-based resources within minutes to new value added applications in order to solve individual and adhoc business problems. In the frame of the EU funded research project FAST, we are currently developing a new platform which allows business users to build usercentric, enterprise class Mashups. In contrast to existing approaches focusing on mashing up heteogeneous data sources, the envisioned FAST platform proposes a screen flow design resulting in so called gadgets which can be executed in various environments -reaching from Enterprise Mashup environments, social networks, and mobile devices to local desktop applications. The underlying concepts and a first prototype of the FAST Platform are presented in this poster session.

IEEE Internet Computing, 2008

Web mashups are Web applications developed using contents and services available online. Despite rapidly increasing interest in mashups, 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.

2012

Despite the recent progresses in end-user development and particularly in mashup application development, developing even simple mashups is still non-trivial and requires intimate knowledge about the functionality of web APIs and services, their interfaces, parameter settings, data mappings, and so on. We aim to assist less skilled developers in composing own mashups by interactively recommending composition knowledge in the form of modeling patterns and fostering knowledge reuse. Our prototype system demonstrates our idea of interactive recommendation and automated pattern weaving, which involves recommending relevant composition patterns to the users during development, and once selected, applying automatically the changes as suggested in the selected pattern to the mashup model under development. The experimental evaluation of our prototype implementation demonstrates that even complex composition patterns can be efficiently stored, queried and weaved into the model under development in browser-based mashup tools.