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 efforts 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 efforts and improve the composition efficiency. A series of experimental study are conducted to evaluate our framework.