A Component-based Approach to Developing Thematic Mashups

Mashup provides a way of forming new applications from existing Web content using APIs provided by different Web sites. Such a nature makes mashup a promising technology to deliver a Web-based Enterprise application with rich information of various themes, so called thematic mashup. However, the development of thematic mashup is ad-hoc and mostly from the scratch, which can be a barrier for Enterprise applications to leverage mashups. For an Enterprise application, the complexity of business logic and the requirements to adapt to a changing business environment demand a development method that helps to achieve reusability and maintainability. Component-based development method has proved practical to reduce the complexity of software development by reusing modular components. In this paper, we propose a reference architecture with key components identified for developing thematic mashups. We further demonstrate the usage of this reference architecture in a case study developing a thematic mashup for a Web-based property valuation application. The contribution of this paper is applying a well-established software engineering discipline to emerging mashup applications, and providing insights of the techniques in developing mashups.