This chapter presents a few of the thousands of mashups you can find today on the Web. No one knows how many other mashups live behind corporate firewalls, but, chances are, the number is large. The mashups in this chapter were chosen to show the variety of the world of mashups. Some of them are proofs-of-concept, others are works-in-progress, and others are experiments. Others are actual, live products or marketing tools. Mashups often provide visualization of information, and, frequently, that visualization is in the form of interactive maps. The release of the Google maps API was a major factor in the interest in mashups, in large part because so much information lends itself to mapping. As you will see in later chapters of this book, new technologies grouped together as Web 2.0 and AJAX are the building blocks of mashups. In conjunction with APIs such as Google mapping, eBay, Yahoo!, Flickr, and others, you will soon be able to build your own mashups like the ones shown in this chapter.

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML)
AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a term first used by Jesse James Garrett in 2005. AJAX is generally considered to include JavaScript, XML, XHTML, DOM, and XMLHttpRequest, all of which are technologies developed in the 1990s, some of them in conjunction with Microsoft’s Remote Scripting project. Despite this plethora of technologies, the principle is quite simple: a Web page can retrieve and display data without having to refresh or reload the entire page. To do this, the page needs to have its own programming logic (usually provided in JavaScript); it needs to be able to send a request for data (usually done with XMLHttpRequest); and it also needs to be able to load, and then unload, data to and from requests (usually done with XML, XHTML, and DOM).

The phrase “Web 2.0” was first used in 2004 by O’Reilly Media. Web 2.0 refers to the Internet as a platform, as well as the growth of collaborative and sharing services, such as social networking sites, wikis, and the like. programmableweb.com is a primary reference to mashups. You can find mashups categorized by tags, as well as by technologies, on that site.

Download pdf How to Do Everything with Web 2.0 Mashups Chapter 1