SE401:33:Previous Research
Previous Work
This project is an extension of a Summer Scholarship Project by Lauren Taylor.
The project was titled "An Interface for Designing Mashups".
Results from this Project
- Research on current mashups and mashup building tools completed.
- Two original mashups constructed successfully.
- Experience with other mashup tools gained.
- Knowledge of PHP, JavaScript and RSS gained.
- Some requirements/challenges of constructing a tool defined.
Conclusions taken from the Report
Mashups are a new and exciting expansion of web applications. Web 2.0 has enabled more functionality and better tools to emerge. These mashups are wide in variety and purpose, but all use data from external sources. This sharing of data is creating a more connected and unified Internet. That is why it is important that we understand what mashups need and how they are built. Lack of data formatting conventions is a problem when trying to create reusable mashup functionality. RSS feeds are a nice solution to formatting problems, since they extract the information into a XML document.
There are many technologies used for making mashups, such as RSS/ATOM, PHP and JavaScript. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Some APIs are only available with certain technologies and this restricts the mashups. Creating a mashup is difficult to begin with but once the underlying concept is understood, it can be completed reasonably quickly. I found that with developing my two mashups, the second mashup was a lot faster and easier.
Designing a tool for mashup building is a difficult task. Considering users with low computer knowledge is challenging because all current mashups require code to be written. APIs make this much easier, but people without programming skills will still find it difficult. Therefore we need to create a tool to do the code writing for the users – to combine data sources and APIs effectively to create a working mashup.
The full report can be viewed here.
Project Material