Reusable decision space for mashup tool design

Abstract

Mashup tools are a class of integrated development environments that enable rapid, on-the-fly development of mashups-a type of lightweight Web applications mixing content and services provided through the Web. In the past few years there have been growing number of projects, both from academia and industry, aimed at the development of innovative mashup tools. From the software architecture perspective, the massive effort behind the development of these tools creates a large pool of reusable architectural decisions from which the design of future mashup tools can derive considerable benefits. In this paper, focusing on the design of mashup tools, we explore a design space of decisions comprised of design issues and alternatives. The design space knowledge not only is broad enough to explain the variability of existing tools, but also provides a road-map towards the design of next generation mashup tools.

End-user composition of interactive applications through actionable UI components

“…Some other publications also outline several mashups and mashup tool features identified by reviewing the literature on mashups [34]. In [1] the authors propose a design space of mashup tools by surveying more than 60 articles on mashup tools and pointing out that only 22 tools are online. Based on these 22 tools, they propose a model focused on the main perspectives occurring in the design of mashup tools.…”

“…On the basis of this model, and taking into account what is reported in [14,34], in the rest of this section we provide a further characterization of EFESTO in relation to the dimensions that most characterize mashup tools. The considered dimensions are reported in Table 1, indicating with * the ones derived from the design issues in [1].…”

“…For this reason, in [1] the author identified two categories: semi-automation and full-automation. We also introduce a new category, manual, to cover tools without any support in mashup creation.…”

“…The concept of liveness for visual languages presented in [37] is also adopted in the mashup domain [1] with reference to the capacity of tools to immediately interpret and execute the mashups under construction.…”

“…According to the classification reported in [1], Level 1 refers to tools used to compose a mashup as a non-runnable prototype, i.e., not directly connected to any kind of runtime system. This prototype has just a user interface, but does not implement any functionality.…”