Mashlight: a Lightweight Mashup Framework for Everyone
Matteo Albinola, Luciano Baresi, Matteo Carcano, Sam Guinea · 2014
Recently, Web 2.0 has brought a storm on web applica-tion development. In particular, mashups have greatly en-hanced user creativity across the web, allowing end-users to rapidly combine information from diverse sources, and in-tegrate them into “new ” goal-oriented applications. In the meantime, widgets (also built with Web 2.0 technology) have also gained a lot of momentum. Indeed, they have become ever more present in our every day lives, even appearing as first class players in our operating systems (e.g., Mac OS X and Windows 7). In this paper we present Mashlight: a lightweight frame-work for creating and executing mashups that combines these two worlds. Indeed, it provides users with a simple means to create “process-like ” mashups using “widget-like ” Web 2.0 applications. Even users that have no technical know-how can string together building blocks –taken from an ex-tensible library – to define the application they need. The framework is implemented using common Web technology, meaning our mashups can be run from different kinds of devices, in a lightweight fashion without the overhead of a complex application server. The paper presents the main concepts behind Mashlight blocks and Mashlight processes, and demonstrate our prototype on a concrete example.