A Mashup Primer

  • By Matt Stephens
  • August 15, 2006

This article at IBM’s DeveloperWorks provides an informative introduction to web mashups.

In a nutshell, a mashup is a web page showing data from more than one third-party data source (the Google Maps API springs to mind). The data can be an API, or can be “scraped” from a normal HTML page (most commonly via regular expressions or XPath queries, assuming the HTML is sufficiently well-formed).

The article divides mashups into several prominent genres: mapping; video and photo; search and shopping; and news.

If you’ve heard of mashups but want to know a little more about why they’re the “buzzword du jour”, the article is well worth a read.

More about a particular breed of mashup tomorrow...

About the Author

Matt Stephens is a senior architect, programmer and project leader based in Central London. He co-wrote Agile Development with ICONIX Process, Extreme Programming Refactored, and Use Case Driven Object Modeling with UML - Theory and Practice.

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