On Mashups ...
A Mashup is an application that combines functionality or content from existing sources. These existing sources can be Web Services (through the use of API’s), RSS feeds or even just other Websites (by screen-scraping).A simple example of mashup
Imagine... that you have a nice online album photo on Flickr or Pikeo... you would like to personalize the access to your album by proposing any user to pick one of your photos and send it by MMS to a relative...That's easy to do and it takes minutes !
Mash the Album photo service component with the Orange sendMMS public API, and there you are, you have created a new and distinct functionnality that was not originally provided by either service. You have created a mashup which should look like the following...
Now let's see how you can do that easily and without coding...
What is Open Mashups
Open Mashups is a unique solution that enables any creative user to simply design (no need to code), run on any device, and share its own mashups.Open Mashups provides a complete graphical design, creation and sharing tool for mashups, that we call the Studio. The Studio comes along with a complete catalog of components, including Orange API's- that you can use to build your mashups.
With the Open Mashups Studio, you can pick the components of your mashups, mash them, and design the behaviour, the User Interface as well as the "look&feel". The Studio also includes a runtime engine so that you can try your mashup anytime during the design process.
The Studio is the front end of Open Mashups. The other important bit of Open Mashups is the transformation chain (e.g. the back end), that allows you to run your mashups on any device. That will be explained in the next section.
Why Open Mashups goes beyond the Web 2.0
- Design once, run everywhere -
Last but not least, Open Mashups, taking advantage of the latest Web
2.0 -and- the latest software
engineering technologies,
enables
you to build, share and publish your
mashups so that one can run them on any device, e.g. : - on the web (one can embed your mashup in a web page),
- on any kind of device, may it be a mobile handset, a TV set-top box, or a PC, by automatically generating an application dedicated to the device.
Where usual mashup toolkits limit the use of your creations within a web page, Open Mashups proposes you to automatically generate runtimes that run on any kind of target.
Our moto could be : "design once, run everywhere" but the term seems to be over-used nowadays -:), so we prefer to use the proof of concept.
Here below is a diagram representing the Open Mashups process flow : You design once, the studio generates one model for your mashup that will be used by transformation chain to generate -and- package applications which can be executed on multiple devices.
You can see below snap shots of different implementations of the "Pikeo + MMS" mashup : mobile handset (j2me), air (from adobe), XHTML+JS.
