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Mashup (web application hybrid)

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A mashup (computer industry jargon ), in web development , is a web page or web application that uses content from more than one source to create a single new service displayed in a single graphical interface. For example, a user could combine the addresses and photographs of their library branches with a Google map to create a map mashup. The term implies easy, fast integration, frequently using open application programming interfaces ( open API ) and data sources to produce enriched results that were not necessarily the original reason for producing the raw source data. The term mashup originally comes from creating something by combining elements from two or more sources.

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52-437: The main characteristics of a mashup are combination, visualization, and aggregation. It is important to make existing data more useful, for personal and professional use. To be able to permanently access the data of other services, mashups are generally client applications or hosted online. In the past years, more and more Web applications have published APIs that enable software developers to easily integrate data and functions

104-509: A blog post, this post could be tagged with their name, title, and the subject of the post. Tagging makes it easier for users of the intranet to find the content they are interested in. This will ultimately cause a ripple effect where users will also be generating ad hoc navigation and information flows. Corporate portals also offer customers and employees self-service opportunities. Search portals aggregate results from several search engines into one page. Users can find search portals specialized in

156-668: A mashup enabler is a tool for creating an RSS feed from a spreadsheet (which cannot easily be used to create a mashup). Many mashup editors include mashup enablers, for example, Presto Mashup Connectors, Convertigo Web Integrator or Caspio Bridge . Mashup enablers have also been described as "the service and tool providers, [sic] that make mashups possible". Early mashups were developed manually by enthusiastic programmers. However, as mashups became more popular, companies began creating platforms for building mashups, which allow designers to visually construct mashups by connecting together mashup components. Mashup editors have greatly simplified

208-420: A mashup is divided into three layers: Architecturally, there are two styles of mashups: Web-based and server-based. Whereas Web-based mashups typically use the user's web browser to combine and reformat the data, server-based mashups analyze and reformat the data on a remote server and transmit the data to the user's browser in its final form. Mashups appear to be a variation of a façade pattern . That is:

260-426: A more fluid user experience for connecting users spanning multiple domains during a given "session". Cloud portals like Nubifer Cloud Portal show what is possible using Enterprise Mashup and Web Service integration approaches to building cloud portals. A number of portals have come about which are specific to a particular domain, offering access to related companies and services; a prime example of this trend would be

312-427: A network. These computer terminals were clients of the time-sharing mainframe computer . In one classification, client computers and devices are either thick clients , thin clients , or diskless nodes . A thick client , also known as a rich client or fat client , is a client that performs the bulk of any data processing operations itself, and does not necessarily rely on the server . The personal computer

364-534: A new vision of the Web , where users are able to contribute. The term "mashup" is not formally defined by any standard-setting body. The broader context of the history of the Web provides a background for the development of mashups. Under the Web 1.0 model, organizations stored consumer data on portals and updated them regularly. They controlled all the consumer data, and the consumer had to use their products and services to get

416-494: A number of different sources and may run on a non-standard local Web server. In addition, business portals can be designed for sharing and collaboration in workplaces. A further business-driven requirement of portals is that the content be presented on multiple platforms such as personal computers , laptops, tablet computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), cell phones and smartphones . Information, news, and updates are examples of content that could be delivered through such

468-603: A part of America Online , the Walt Disney Company launched Go.com . Portal metaphors are widely used by public library sites for borrowers using a login as users and by university intranets for students and for faculty. Vertical markets remain for independent software vendors ( ISVs ) offering management and executive intranet "dashboards" for corporations and government agencies in areas such as governance, risk management, and compliance Web portals are sometimes classified as horizontal or vertical . A horizontal portal

520-443: A point of access to invisible Web cultural content that may not be indexed by standard search engines. Digitised collections can include scans or digital photos of books, artworks, photography, journals, newspapers, maps, diaries and letters and digital files of music, sound recordings, films, and archived websites as well as the descriptive metadata associated with each type of cultural work (e.g., metadata provides information about

572-408: A portal is translated into individual read operations on all the portlets that form the page (" render " operations on local, JSR 168 portlets or " getMarkup " operations on remote, WSRP portlets). If a submit button is pressed on any portlet on a portal page, it is translated into an update operation on that portlet alone ( processAction on a local portlet or performBlockingInteraction on

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624-608: A portal. Personal portals can be related to any specific topic such as providing friends information on a social network or providing links to outside content that may help others beyond the reach of services. Portals are not limited to simply providing links. Outside of business intranet user, very often simpler portals become replaced with richer mashup designs. Within enterprises, early portals were often replaced by much more powerful "dashboard" designs. Some also have relied on newer protocols such as some version of RSS aggregation and may or may not involve some degree of Web harvesting. At

676-479: A product, for example property search portals. Library search portals are also known as discovery interfaces. Property search portals aggregate data about properties for sale or rent by real estate agents or vendors. Notable agent search portals in the UK include Nestoria , Nuroa , OnTheMarket , Rightmove and Zoopla . Notable vendor (seller or landlord) portals in the UK include OpenRent and Gumtree . A tender portal

728-450: A remote, WSRP portlet). The update is then immediately followed by a read on all portlets on the page. Portal technology is about server-side, presentation-tier aggregation. It cannot be used to drive more robust forms of application integration such as two-phase commit . Mashups differ from portals in the following respects: The portal model has been around longer and has had greater investment and product research. Portal technology

780-521: A software engineering design pattern that provides a simplified interface to a larger body of code (in this case the code to aggregate the different feeds with different APIs ). Mashups can be used with software provided as a service ( SaaS ). After several years of standards development, mainstream businesses are starting to adopt service-oriented architectures (SOA) to integrate disparate data by making them available as discrete Web services. Web services provide open, standardized protocols to provide

832-407: A unified means of accessing information from a diverse set of platforms ( operating systems , programming languages , applications ). These Web services can be reused to provide completely new services and applications within and across organizations, providing business flexibility. Client (computing) Client is a computer that gets information from another computer called server in

884-410: A variety of clients, which vary on the chat protocol being used. Multiplayer video games or online video games may run as a client on each computer. The term "client" may also be applied to computers or devices that run the client software or users that use the client software. A client is part of a client–server model , which is still used today. Clients and servers may be computer programs run on

936-416: A way for enterprises and organizations to provide a consistent " look and feel " with access control and procedures for multiple applications and databases, which otherwise would have been different web entities at various URLs . The features available may be restricted by whether access is by an authorized and authenticated user (employee, member) or an anonymous website visitor. The term "portal" emerged in

988-474: Is a Web Page at a Website on the World Wide Web or a local HTML home page including JavaScript and perhaps running in a modified Web browser . A personal portal typically provides personalized capabilities to its visitors or its local user, providing a pathway to other content. It may be designed to use distributed applications , different numbers and types of middleware and hardware to provide services from

1040-403: Is a common example of a fat client, because of its relatively large set of features and capabilities and its light reliance upon a server. For example, a computer running an art program (such as Krita or Sketchup ) that ultimately shares the result of its work on a network is a thick client. A computer that runs almost entirely as a standalone machine save to send or receive files via a network

1092-428: Is a gateway for government suppliers to bid on providing goods and services. Tender portals allow users to search, modify, submit, review and archive data in order to provide a complete online tendering process. Using online tendering, bidders can do any of the following: Hosted Web portals gained popularity and a number of companies began offering them as a hosted service. The hosted portal market fundamentally changed

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1144-446: Is a specially designed website that brings information from diverse sources, like emails , online forums and search engines , together in a uniform way. Usually, each information source gets its dedicated area on the page for displaying information (a portlet ); often, the user can configure which ones to display. Variants of portals include mashups and intranet dashboards for executives and managers. The extent to which content

1196-451: Is an online gallery, index and search engine for news published online. It may cater to specific interest or language or target a wider market. A web portal is a website that provides a broad array of services, such as search engines , e-mail , online shopping , and forums . American web portals included Pathfinder , Excite , Netscape 's Net Center, Go , NBC , MSN , Lycos , Voila, Yahoo! , and Google Search . A personal portal

1248-406: Is by a standard called a workstation . A thin client is a minimal sort of client. Thin clients use the resources of the host computer. A thin client generally only presents processed data provided by an application server , which performs the bulk of any required data processing. A device using web application (such as Office Web Apps ) is a thin client. A diskless node is a mixture of

1300-431: Is displayed in a "uniform way" may depend on the intended user and the intended purpose, as well as the diversity of the content. Very often design emphasis is on a certain "metaphor" for configuring and customizing the presentation of the content (e.g., a dashboard or map) and the chosen implementation framework or code libraries. In addition, the role of the user in an organization may determine which content can be added to

1352-539: Is the consumer mashup, aimed at the general public. Mashups can also be categorized by the basic API type they use but any of these can be combined with each other or embedded into other applications. In technology, a mashup enabler is a tool for transforming incompatible IT resources into a form that allows them to be easily combined, in order to create a mashup. Mashup enablers allow powerful techniques and tools (such as mashup platforms) for combining data and services to be applied to new kinds of resources. An example of

1404-526: Is therefore more standardized and mature. Over time, increasing maturity and standardization of mashup technology will likely make it more popular than portal technology because it is more closely associated with Web 2.0 and lately Service-oriented Architectures (SOA). New versions of portal products are expected to eventually add mashup support while still supporting legacy portlet applications. Mashup technologies, in contrast, are not expected to provide support for portal standards. Mashup uses are expanding in

1456-599: Is used as a platform to several companies in the same economic sector or to the same type of manufacturers or distributors. A vertical portal (also known as a "vortal") is a specialized entry point to a specific market or industry niche, subject area, or interest. Some vertical portals are known as "vertical information portals" (VIPs). VIPs provide news, editorial content, digital publications, and e-commerce capabilities. In contrast to traditional vertical portals, VIPs also provide dynamic multimedia applications including social networking, video posting, and blogging. A news portal

1508-477: The Business Mashups concept of delivering a variety of information, tools, applications and access points through a single mechanism. With the increase in user-generated content (blog posts, comments, photos), disparate data silos, and file formats, information architects and taxonomists will be required to allow users the ability to tag (classify) the data or content. For example, if a vice-president makes

1560-448: The SOA way, instead of building them by themselves. Mashups can be considered to have an active role in the evolution of social software and Web 2.0 . Mashup composition tools are usually simple enough to be used by end-users. They generally do not require programming skills and rather support visual wiring of GUI widgets , services and components together. Therefore, these tools contribute to

1612-885: The ability to convert other kinds of data and services into mashable resources. Of course, not all valuable data is located within organizations. In fact, the most valuable information for business intelligence and decision support is often external to the organization. With the emergence of rich web applications and online Web portals, a wide range of business-critical processes (such as ordering) are becoming available online. Unfortunately, very few of these data sources syndicate content in RSS format and very few of these services provide publicly accessible APIs. Mashup editors therefore solve this problem by providing enablers or connectors. Mashups and portals are both content aggregation technologies. Portals are an older technology designed as an extension to traditional dynamic Web applications , in which

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1664-414: The above two client models. Similar to a fat client, it processes locally, but relies on the server for storing persistent data. This approach offers features from both the fat client (multimedia support, high performance) and the thin client (high manageability, flexibility). A device running an online version of the video game Diablo III is an example of diskless node. Web portal A web portal

1716-475: The application server. For early Web browsers permitting HTML frameset and iframe elements, diverse information could be presented without violating the browser same-source security policy (relied upon to prevent a variety of cross-site security breaches). More recent client-side technologies rely on JavaScript frameworks and libraries that rely on more recent Web functionality such as WebSockets and asynchronous callbacks using XMLHttpRequests . The server hosting

1768-539: The author, publisher, etc.). These portals are often based around a specific national or regional groupings of institutions. Notable cultural portals include: Corporate intranets became common during the 1990s. As intranets grew in size and complexity, organization webmasters were faced with increasing content and user management challenges. A consolidated view of company information was judged insufficient; users wanted personalization and customization. Webmasters, if skilled enough, were able to offer some capabilities, but for

1820-524: The beginning, most mashups were consumer-based, but recently the mashup is to be seen as an interesting concept useful also to enterprises. Business mashups can combine existing internal data with external services to generate new views on the data. There was also the free Yahoo! Pipes to build mashups for free using the Yahoo! Query Language . There are many types of mashup, such as business mashups, consumer mashups, and data mashups. The most common type of mashup

1872-420: The business environment. Business mashups are useful for integrating business and data services, as business mashups technologies provide the ability to develop new integrated services quickly, to combine internal services with external or personalized information, and to make these services tangible to the business user through user-friendly Web browser interfaces. Business mashups differ from consumer mashups in

1924-606: The composition of portals. In many ways they served simply as a tool for publishing information instead of the loftier goals of integrating legacy applications or presenting correlated data from distributed databases. The early hosted portal companies such as Hyperoffice.com or the now defunct InternetPortal.com focused on collaboration and scheduling in addition to the distribution of corporate data. As hosted Web portals have risen in popularity their feature set has grown to include hosted databases, document management, email, discussion fora and more. Hosted portals automatically personalize

1976-490: The content generated from their modules to provide a personalized experience to their users. In this regard they have remained true to the original goals of the earlier corporate Web portals. Emerging new classes of Internet portals called Cloud Portals are showcasing the power of API (Application Programming Interface) rich software systems leveraging SOA ( service-oriented architecture , Web services, and custom data exchange) to accommodate machine to machine interaction creating

2028-637: The context of client–server model of computer networks . The server is often (but not always) on another computer system, in which case the client accesses the service by way of a network. A client is a computer or a program that, as part of its operation, relies on sending a request to another program or a computer hardware or software that accesses a service made available by a server (which may or may not be located on another computer). For example, web browsers are clients that connect to web servers and retrieve web pages for display. Email clients retrieve email from mail servers . Online chat uses

2080-560: The creation of mashups, significantly increasing the productivity of mashup developers and even opening mashup development to end-users and non-IT experts. Standard components and connectors enable designers to combine mashup resources in all sorts of complex ways with ease. Mashup platforms, however, have done little to broaden the scope of resources accessible by mashups and have not freed mashups from their reliance on well-structured data and open libraries ( RSS feeds and public APIs ). Mashup enablers evolved to address this problem, providing

2132-408: The crucial functions of the application. This application server is in turn connected to database servers, and may be part of a clustered server environment. High-capacity portal configurations may include load balancing strategies. For portals that present application functionality to the user, the portal server is in reality the front piece of a server configuration that includes some connectivity to

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2184-600: The end of the dot-com boom in the 1990s, many governments had already committed to creating government web portal sites for their citizens. These included primary portals to the governments as well as portals developed for specific branches (e.g., a particular government ministry, department or agency), or for specific sub-audiences (e.g., senior citizens, parents, post-secondary students, etc.). Notable government web portals include: Cultural portals aggregate digitised cultural collections of galleries, libraries (see: library portal ), archives and museums. This type of portal provides

2236-482: The growth in property portals that give access to services such as estate agents , removal firm , and solicitors that offer conveyancing . Along the same lines, industry-specific news and information portals have appeared, such as the clinical trials-specific portal . The main concept is to present the user with a single Web page that brings together or aggregates content from a number of other systems or servers. The application server or architecture performs most of

2288-441: The information. The advent of Web 2.0 introduced Web standards that were commonly and widely adopted across traditional competitors and which unlocked the consumer data. At the same time, mashups emerged, allowing mixing and matching competitors' APIs to develop new services. The first mashups used mapping services or photo services to combine these services with data of any kind and therefore to produce visualizations of data. In

2340-444: The interoperability of portlets across different portal platforms. These standards allow portal developers, administrators and consumers to integrate standards-based portals and portlets across a variety of vendor solutions. The concept of content aggregation seems to still gain momentum and portal solution will likely continue to evolve significantly over the next few years. The Gartner Group predicts generation 8 portals to expand on

2392-479: The late 1990s to describe a new genre of website. After the proliferation of Web browsers in the late-1990s, many companies tried to build or acquire a portal to attempt to obtain a share of an Internet market. The Web portal gained special attention because it was, for many users, the starting point of their Web browsing if it was set as their home page . The content and branding of a portal could change as Internet companies merged or were acquired. Netscape became

2444-455: The level of integration with business computing environments, security and access control features, governance, and the sophistication of the programming tools (mashup editors) used. Another difference between business mashups and consumer mashups is a growing trend of using business mashups in commercial software as a service (SaaS) offering. Many of the providers of business mashups technologies have added SOA features. The architecture of

2496-602: The most part ended up driving users away from using the intranet. Many companies began to offer tools to help webmasters manage their data, applications and information more easily, and by providing different users with personalized views. Portal solutions can also include workflow management, collaboration between work groups or branches, and policy-managed content publication. Most can allow internal and external access to specific corporate information using secure authentication or single sign-on . JSR168 Standards emerged around 2001. Java Specification Request (JSR) 168 standards allow

2548-403: The portal may only be a "pass through" for the user. By use of portlets , application functionality can be presented in any number of portal pages. For the most part, this architecture is transparent to the user. In such a design, security and concurrent user capacity can be important issues, and security designers need to ensure that only authenticated and authorized users can generate requests to

2600-454: The portal or deleted from the portal configuration. A portal may use a search engine's application programming interface (API) to permit users to search intranet content as opposed to extranet content by restricting which domains may be searched. Apart from this common search engines feature, web portals may offer other services such as e-mail , news, stock quotes, information from databases and even entertainment content. Portals provide

2652-472: The process of converting data content into marked-up Web pages is split into two phases: generation of markup "fragments" and aggregation of the fragments into pages. Each markup fragment is generated by a " portlet ", and the portal combines them into a single Web page. Portlets may be hosted locally on the portal server or remotely on a separate server. Portal technology defines a complete event model covering reads and updates. A request for an aggregate page on

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2704-500: The same machine and connect via inter-process communication techniques. Combined with Internet sockets , programs may connect to a service operating on a possibly remote system through the Internet protocol suite . Servers wait for potential clients to initiate connections that they may accept. The term was first applied to devices that were not capable of running their own stand-alone programs, but could interact with remote computers via

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