Interactive, live mashup development through UI-oriented computing

This paper proposes to approach the problem of developing mashups by exclusively focusing on the SurfaceWeb, that is, the data and functionality accessible through common Web pages. Typically, mashups focus on the integration of resources accessible through the Deep Web, such as data feeds, Web services and Web APIs, that do not have own UIs – next to data extracted from Web pages. Yet, these resources can be wrapped with ad-doc UIs, suitably instrumented, and made accessible through the Surface Web. Doing so enables a UI-oriented computing paradigm that allows developers to implement mashups interactively and in a live fashion inside theirWeb browser, without having to program any line of code. The goal of this paper is to showcase UI-oriented computing in practice and to demonstrate its feasibility and potential.