Mashing Up Oil and Water: Combining Heterogeneous Services for Diverse Users

Connecting heterogeneous services is a complex endeavor that requires support at both the middleware and user-interface levels. Offering users a varied palette of mashup development environments and service interfaces lets users choose elements appropriate to their skill levels and their tasks. The authors discuss their experiences using various development paradigms, such as spreadsheets and high-level scripting, to mash up diverse services. They describe their middleware and service adapters, which abstract the difference between service interfaces, and compare several mashup interfaces aimed at different user groups.