A Cloud-based Platform for Enterprise Mashup Ecosystems

In the last years we witnessed a proliferation of the Web APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) provided by Web companies such as eBay, Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, etc. in order to ´open´ their platforms to 3rd party developers to increase revenues. These APIs can be combined together to create new value added services called Mashups. In this paper we propose a classification of some Mashup types and then we show through examples how they can be applied to different application domains. The paper also describes a platform for Mashup creation and execution according to the Platform as a Service -- PaaS Cloud Computing paradigm. Finally we describe a ´Mashup Ecosystem´ enabled by such a platform and inspired by the Apple Store case study.