Services Mashups

Abstract

The New Generation of Web Applications T he Internet and related tech­ nologies have created an inter­ connected world in which we can exchange information easily, process tasks collaboratively, and form commu­ nities among users with similar inter­ ests to achieve efficiency and improve performance. Web services are emerg­ ing as a major technology for deploying automated interactions between distrib­ uted and heterogeneous applications, and for connecting business processes, which might span companies' bound­ aries. 1 Various standards support this deployment, including, for enterpris­ es, the Web Services Description Lan­ guage (WSDL), UDDI, and SOAP. These standards support the definition of Web services and their advertisement to the potential user community, binding for invocation purposes, and reuse. At the same time, use of " lighter­weight " ap­ proaches to services, especially for Web applications, is increasing. Here, the Web APIs and RESTful (Representa­ tional State Transfer) reign supreme.