HyperMash: A Heterogeneous Service Composition Approach for Better Support of the End Users

The emergence of Web 2.0 and its related technologies such as HTML5 has empowered the end users and made it possible for them to compose their own Web applications. Yet, most of the current development has mainly concentrated on the support of the composition of enterprise-oriented services and scientific workflows, with not enough effort made to support the composition of end user-oriented services. This paper presents HyperMash, a service composition approach for the end users. The salient feature of this approach is its support of on demand heterogeneous service composition, which allows the end users to create their own composite services by combining RESTful services with SOAP-based services at runtime. In addition, to make it easier for the end users to compose RESTful services, HyperMash provides a full set of RESTful interface features. The paper describes the conceptual framework and working principles of HyperMash and illustrates the HyperMash approach through two examples.