Towards Pervasive Mashups in Embedded Devices

The Web has become pervasive. This has led to a paradigm shift, where applications live on the Web as services, where they can be accessed using terminals of different types, such as regular computers, mobile devices, game consoles, and so on. The ability to dynamically combine data, code and other content from numerous web sites all over the world, and the ability to instantly publish services worldwide has opened up entirely new possibilities for software development. Such applications, referred to as mashups, are content aggregates that leverage the power of the Web to support instant, worldwide sharing of content. Unfortunately, for various reasons, the browser that is commonly used as the run-time environment of mashups is inadequate for hosting complex applications, in particular when considering embedded devices and subsystems that are not readily available in the web. In this paper, we introduce a runtime environment, intended for embedded devices, that is able to host mashups that combine data from the web and device specific peripherals, thus enabling context-aware mashups. As an example, we describe a mashup that combines map data from an existing map service and GPS data available from an external system.