concept mashup in category cloud
This is an excerpt from Manning's book The Cloud at Your Service: The when, how, and why of enterprise cloud computing.
Are building request-response web apps or mashups
Adoption and growth of mashups will increase the growth of the cloud. In web development, a mashup is a web page or application that combines data or functionality from two or more external sources to create a new service. The term mashup implies easy, fast integration, frequently using open APIs and data sources to produce results that weren’t the original reason for producing the raw source data.
Mashups are possible only because of the cloud. Their rapid adoption and growth will fuel the further growth of the cloud, and the reverse is true as well. Yet again, we’ll see a self-reinforcing Krebs-like cycle where cloud enables mashups, and mashups promote much more use of the cloud. The clouds enabled mashups, but the ease of creating new applications through mashups will in turn make cloud growth literally explode.
An example of a mashup is the use of cartographic data to add location information to real estate data. It creates a new and distinct web API not originally provided by either source. Google Maps are probably the most common component used in mashups (see figure 9.8). You’ll see Google Maps with all kinds of different data merged to create a simple but useful kind of mashup.
Figure 9.8. A mashup using Google Maps combined with data about collapsed civilizations. Google Maps merge together all kinds of data, creating a simple but useful kind of mashup. Source: University of Florida.
Similar to the concept of a portal,[1] mashups involve content aggregation loosely defined to be based on Web 2.0 (think social networks) types of techniques. A lot of people will wake up and realize they’re sitting on extremely desirable data that they never before had a way to monetize. They’ll host it in the cloud and provide an API to it, and suddenly the data will be accessible to the world of mashups.