Developing Client-Side Mashups: Experiences, Guidelines and Reference Architecture

Software mashups that combine content from multiple web sites to an integrated experience are a popular trend. However, methods, tools and architectures for creating mashups are still rather undeveloped, and there is little engineering support behind them. In this paper the authors present guidelines that can serve as a helpful starting point for the design of new mashups. Guidelines focus mainly on mashup creation methods. Furthermore, they describe a reference architecture for client-side mashup development. In addition, the authors provide insight into mashup development based on their practical experiences in implementing various sample client-side mashup applications and tools for creating them. The long term goal of the authors’ work is to facilitate the development of compelling, robust and maintainable mashup applications, and more generally ease the transition towards web-based software development.