Building Mashups for the Enterprise with SABRE

Abstract

Abstract. The explosive popularity of mashups has given rise to a plethora of web-based tools for rapidly building mashups with minimal programming effort. In turn, this has spurred interest in using these tools to empower end-users to build situational applications for business. Situational applications based on Reo (SABRE) is a service composition platform that addresses service heterogeneity as a first-class concern by adopting a mashup's data-centric approach. Built atop the Reo coordination language, SABRE provides tools to combine, filter and transform web services and data sources like RSS and ATOM feeds. Whereas other mashup platforms intermingle data transformation logic and I/O concerns, we aim to clearly separate them by formalising coordination logic within a mashup. Reo's well-defined compositional semantics opens up the possibility of constructing a mashup's core logic from a library of prebuilt connectors. Input/output in SABRE is handled by service stubs generated by combining a syntactic service specification such as WSDL with a constraint automaton specifying service behaviour. These stubs insulate services from misbehaving clients while protecting clients against services that do not conform to their contracts. We believe these are compelling features as mashups graduate from curiosities on the Web to situational applications for the enterprise.

Semantic-Based Mashup of Composite Applications

“…For example, IBM's DAMIA [26], MashupHub [27], SABRE [28], or Apatar [29] largely target enterprise intranet environments, whereas Popfly [30] or Intel Mash Maker [31] are aimed at individual users and private use. The execution environment of a mashup could be on a server, client (i.e., browser), or a stand-alone desktop application.…”

“…As a number of research works suggest [32], [28], [33], [34], most tools provide limited search and discovery for mashup components. Users still need to know how to write code (e.g., JavaScript or XML/HTML) and link the components using technical concepts derived from programming.…”

Enterprise Mashup Systems as Platform for Situational Applications

“…Another important aspect and technical challenge is the prevailing heterogeneity among EMs (de Vrieze et al 2009, p. 69;Maraika et al 2008). Data resources and services can present a broader form of heterogeneity of semantics (I/O), functionality (behavioral), non-functionality (QoS, policy), and execution (runtime, infrastructure, exceptions).…”

Automatic Mash Up of Composite Applications

“…With this annotation, we are describing the message in terms of an OWL class in an existing ontological model. This message is set as an output of the "pubCityState" operation in a portType (lines [18][19][20][21][22] and included in a portlet type binding (lines [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35]. The "pubCityState" operation corresponds to broadcasting the city and state information to PropertyBroker.…”