Mashups and End-User Development

Abstract

A unique feature of mashup composition practices is their potential as a means for empowering end users, that is, laypeople not necessarily experts in programming but with a good knowledge in a given domain, to reuse resources and develop in a short time own, new full-fledged Web applications. One reason behind the emergence of mashups was indeed the desire of end users to construct applications responding to their situational needs, thus accommodating the long tail of requirements not fulfilled by common existing applications. This chapter discusses the liaison that exists between mashup composition practices and End-User Development (EUD), that is, the principles and techniques for the design of tools that can enable nonprofessional software developers to create own software artifacts. In particular, the chapter analyzes the main ingredients that can promote the EUD of mashups: first of all, lightweight development processes promoting user-driven innovation processes, but also tools that can support end users by means of composition paradigms that abstract from technical details, open and elastic architectures that can be customized to the peculiarities of the usage domain, and mechanisms to assist the users while discovering components and/or defining the component integration logic.