Many business Web-based applications do not offer APIs to enable other applications to access their data and functions in a programmatic manner. This makes their composition difficult for instance to synchronize data between two applications. To address this challenge, this paper presents Abmash, an approach to facilitate the integration of such legacy Web applications by automatically imitating human interactions with them. By automatically interacting with the GUI of Web applications, the system supports all forms of integrations including bidirectional interactions and is able to interact with AJAX-based applications. Furthermore, the integration programs are easy to write because they deal with end-user, visual UI elements. The integration code is simple enough to be called a 'mash-up'. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
According to the literature, the term "mashup" refers to programs that are related to the concepts of and . For instance, Yahoo Pipes @cite_40 composes RSS feeds to create new ones; they are programed through an intuitive graphical user-interface. The ease of development in mashup development is often associated to (e.g. @cite_15 ), meaning that persons with little or even no programming education can still be able to create programs with an appropriate infrastructure.
@cite_40 @cite_15
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Here's yet another way to mash up services for the convenience of your customers. Read about how to use Yahoo! Pipes and see what sorts of ideals bubble up in your mind. There is a tremendous amount of web content available today, but it is not always in a form that supports end-users' needs. In many cases, all of the data and services needed to accomplish a goal already exist, but are not in a form amenable to an end-user. To address this problem, we have developed an end-user programming tool called Marmite, which lets end-users create so-called mashups that re-purpose and combine existing web content and services. In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of Marmite. An informal user study found that programmers and some spreadsheet users had little difficulty using the system.