Service Mashups 32 Published by the IEEE Computer Society 1089-7801/08/$25.00 © 2008 IEEE IEEE INTERNET COMPUTING An Online Platform for Web APIs and Service Mashups E. Michael Maximilien IBM Almaden Research Center Ajith Ranabahu and Karthik Gomadam Wright State University Mashups are lourishing on the programmable Web. Developers create mashups by combining components of existing Web sites and applications. Although the rapid mashup proliferation offers many opportunities, a lack of standardization and compatibility presents considerable challenges. To address this, the IBM Sharable Code online service platform uses an innovative domain- speciic language that provides a common structure and design for mashups as well as facilities to help share and reuse mashup components. T he Web is now programmable. This fact has been facilitated and accel- erated by Web data’s availability as structured XML feeds (such as RSS and Atom) and by the externalization of Web application interactions through application programming interfaces. Indeed, most new Web sites and appli- cations expose either data feeds or more advanced APIs, such as Representation- al State Transfer (REST) services or the Atom publishing protocol (AtomPub). Currently, the primary manifestation of the programmable Web are mashups. Mashups combine views, data, and logic from existing Web sites or ap- plications to create novel applications that focus on situational and ephemer- al problems. Developers are now using various Web APIs to create a plethora of mashups to solve all types of prob- lems, from esoteric mashups that re- cord the location and availability of rare gaming consoles to those that cre- ate Sudoku games from Flickr photos. However, there are also more generally useful mashups, such as those offer- ing weather information and mapping services. Mashup directories and mar- ketplaces let users rank and discuss mashups. ProgrammableWeb.com is one such directory; as of April 2008, it listed more than 3,000 mashups and more than 740 different APIs. Similar directories include StrikeIron.com and Mashable.com. The many available mashups suggest a lourishing and innovative Web, but they also raise new challenges, includ- ing that