Rapid development of situational mashup applications using open APIs and tools

Google maps, screen crawlers, Microsoft Bing, Yahoo pipes, delicious, Flickr, identi.ca

Situational applications are "good enough" applications that quickly develop to meet user-specific needs. Mashups, as an application development model for rapid integration of data, can quickly integrate information related to a topic to meet the needs of situational applications. Scenario Mashup application requirements can be built quickly, using open APIs and tools as the best choice.

In the age of the Web 2.0, everyone's passion and creativity are released to publicize their individuality. On the one hand, users are no longer satisfied with the complex applications of all-inclusive, but have a lot of personalized needs; On the other hand, the popularity of open APIs and tools makes it possible for ordinary users with a certain programming base to develop applications. A huge amount of personalized requirements can not be satisfied by the general enterprise applications, situational applications and mashups become the best tool to meet user's personalized needs. The next step is to introduce the context of the scenario mashup application.

Scenario Mashup Application

Before introducing the application of situational mashup, this paper first introduces the scenario application in general sense.

Scenario-type Application

Situational applications (situational application) are different from general enterprise applications. The General enterprise application is used to solve a series of complex business problems. The development of enterprise applications requires a longer period of time, requires detailed project planning, but also requires more human resources. Scenario-style applications are usually used only to meet a specific requirement, so the development time is shorter and the manpower required is low. Usually a few developers can complete a situational application in a few days. Enterprise application and maintenance time is relatively long, later maintenance cost is higher, and the life cycle of situational application is short, can be discarded after use.

Compared with the enterprise application, the situational application is getting more and more attention, among which the following are the main reasons:

Faster to meet the needs of users. Scenario-type application development cycle is short, can start from the user's core needs, quickly build the version that can be run, so as to get user feedback earlier and constantly improve.

"Long tail" of the demand. Each user's specific requirements for the application are different. General enterprise application features more, and more general, belong to the "Big Head" application, and situational application focus on solving each user specific unique needs, belong to the "long tail" application. At present, more and more ordinary people into the ranks of software development, they only need to understand a few technical knowledge, you can use the existing APIs and tools to create their own situational application.

"Good enough" application. Different from the rigorous requirements analysis, development and testing processes in enterprise application development, situational application pursues the goal of "good enough". That is, situational applications only need to be able to work in most cases. This allows developers to quickly complete and publish their applications.

Mashups are a typical scenario-style application and are the subject of this article. The following is a brief introduction to Mashups.

Mashup

Mashups are generally translated into "mix and match". The word comes from a method of arranging in pop music. This method combines the various parts from different tracks to form new songs. After the word is applied to the computer field, different people have different opinions about it. Wikipedia's explanation for mashups is that mashup is a Web application that combines data from multiple data sources into an integrated tool that provides new Web services that the original data source cannot provide. The essence of mashups is to provide new services, which is called "1+1>2", to derive new value from the portfolio. With two or more data sources as input, the output produced is not just a simple addition of these inputs.

A typical mashup uses enterprise content or data on the WEB and organizes it around a specific topic. You can use the open APIs and tools on the WEB during the creation of mashups. This article will create mashup applications based on a single topic and introduce relevant open APIs and tools. This topic is briefly described below.

Sample Mashup Application-Latest dynamic mashups for Influenza A (H1N1)

Influenza A (H1N1) has been the focus of attention since its popularity. Everyone is more concerned about the latest status of influenza, including related news, epidemic dynamics and prevention and control knowledge. To understand the dynamics of swine flu, there are many types of information available, including news, blogs, pictures, videos, and micro blogs. The sample mashup application in this article will integrate all kinds of information related to swine flu to be presented in a WEB application.

The mashup application is done using a series of open APIs and tools on the Web. These APIs and tools include Google maps, screen crawlers, Microsoft Bing, Yahoo pipes, delicious, Flickr, and identi.ca, as shown in table 1. The JavaScript framework used by the sample mashup application is the Dojo 1.3.1.

Table 1. List of APIs and tools used in the sample mashup

api and tools
google map	> on the map, show the global countries and Confirmed cases of swine flu in the region and the number of deaths.
screen crawl	Grab number from HTML page According to, provided to Google maps to use.
Microsoft Bing	> search for the swine flu phase Off the video.
Yahoo pipes
google AJAX feeds API	Converts the Rss/atom feed into JSON format.
delicious	> search for a h1n 1 flu-related URLs.
flickr	> search for a swine flu-related picture.
identi.ca	> search for a h1n 1 flu-related micro-blogging content.
google App Engine	Deploy sample Mashup application.